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Abstract

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Collaboration Engineering (CE) is an approach to designing collaborative work systems for high-value tasks, and transferring them to practitioners to execute for themselves without support from a collaboration expert. The stakes are high on a CE project, so it would be useful to have a way to evaluate the performance of the collaboration engineers (CEs) who design the work systems. One can evaluate an engineer in terms of the efficiency of resource use, the timeliness of completion, stakeholder satisfaction, and the quality of work with respect to objectives.Measures for resource efficiency, timeliness, and satisfaction are common across disciplines.Measures of work quality, however, are specific to each discipline because each has different objectives. This paper focuses on evaluating the performance of CEs with respect to work quality. Toward that end, we contribute a seven-stage CE methodology based on the Six Layer model of collaboration, and define for each stage its objectives, key activities and work products. From those we derive indicators of work quality for each stage based on a) the justifiability of key decisions; and b) quality of work products. The performance indicators are framed as checklist questions with either yes/no, no/yes, or five-point scales. These indicators are heuristics; they are not designed to be validated metrics for rigorously-defined theoretical constructs, and are not intended to support theoretical and experimental research. They are useful for evaluating of CEs' performance during and after a project, and also would support further exploratory and engineering research on the performance of CEs.

The authors find themselves in the midst of a global social transformation that is shaping the common perception of reality. The development of technology-enabled collaborative networks, virtual collaboration, structured collaboration processes, and digital team collaboration affects every part of society. Research on collaboration and collaboration systems has achieved sufficient maturity and scope that an overall conceptual definition of collaboration is now needed and possible. This article proposes a conceptual approach and terminology as a step towards bridging isolated communities of collaborating researchers in various fields. The authors offer a fundamental philosophical description of what collaboration is (and is not) based on relevant epistemological, metaphysical, and axiological insights derived from a synthesis of existing collaboration research, and the authors outline the most obvious needs for further research toward formalizing a more fully-realized philosophy of collaboration.