Introduction to the Minitrack on Developing Visual Collaborative Tools

Abstract

Collaboration has been increasingly required to address the current challenges faced by organizations. With digitalization, these challenges are more and more complex but have common characteristics: they concern the organization as a whole, involve different and heterogeneous stakeholders, and evolve during the organization's lifetime. Moreover, they are at the heart of a paradox: they are of paramount importance for companies, but they are very difficult to grasp. Although practitioners have developed very different definitions and perspectives, each challenge needs to be collectively addressed as the result of discussion and inquiry from different perspectives. These challenges are, for instance, developing innovative solutions to face rapidly changing environments, digitalizing processes, developing business ecosystems, defining projects or initiatives, fostering creativity, or designing and evaluating a new business model. Recently a "new" generation of tools has appeared. These tools are commonly called "canvas" as they were initially inspired by the Business Model Canvas. In fact, we designate this family of tools as visual inquiry tools or visual collaborative tools. These tools have common features that allow diverse stakeholders that face a joint problem to address the aforementioned challenges: • First, developing a shared language and understanding of the problem they are trying to solve.

'License to VIT’ - A Design Taxonomy for Visual Inquiry Tools

“…We drew our sample from the AISeL database, including relevant conferences and journal outlets that are likely to contain VITs. For example, the database includes papers from HICSS, which often had a dedicated track for visual collaboration tools in the past [36,37]. Subsequently, our sample includes papers from conference proceedings of ECIS, HICSS, WI, Pre-ICIS Workshops, BLED, MCIS, and DESRIST.…”