At the Center for Advanced Studies, IBM Ottawa

The reason why the scientific method proclaimed by the CSI show is sexy and fun is because of its practical connection to us all. That is, one could go on theorizing about viable questions, but field research and experience remain invaluable to any theory or mechanism that’s purported to have some practical contribution to human work. In similar lines, I accepted a (strong) suggestion from my lab last month to study collaboration and coordination in globally distributed development teams at IBM Ottawa from May to the end of July. In a sense, my interim appointment could be construed as a participant ethnography.

IBM Ottawa Palladium offices

In particular, I’m involved with highly-distributed teams working on several aspects of the CLM solution. The Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) infrastructure integrates three core products: change and control management (a.k.a. Rational Team Concert, RTC), requirements gathering (a.k.a. Rational Requirements Composer, or RRC), and testing (a.k.a. Rational Quality Management, or RQM). All three products are pillared on the IBM Jazz Foundation, also referred to as the Jazz Application Framework, or JAF. Pretty exciting stuff! To learn more on the Jazz metaphor as well as the collaboration principles, this book by Adrian Cho is sufficiently elucidating, on top of the dedicated website.

The intriguing characteristic of the teams I’m studying here is their high success rate at delivering. Thus, how do they coordinate (presumably efficiently) to deliver? More on this and other questions later on.

Groupware. Then, CMC (with ontology). Then, CSCW

First a recap. In a previous post, I mention that the Internet is the ultimate CSCW artifact. I did that complying with what CSCW tackles as a discipline, succinctly exposed in Bannon & Schmidt’s paper. In their paper, Turoff et al. conclusively argue that the “web should be viewed as a massive group communication system” for Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) products to succeed in the sense of the principles they discuss in the chapter. In a strict scientific sense, CMC may be viewed as subsumed by CSCW. In another post, I argue that groupware is a subset, rather than a fork, of CSCW. In fact, if we view groupware as the set of artifacts (interfaces) that aid group communication, we may as well argue that groupware is a subtype of CMC. Hence, we’re still eddying within the realm of CSCW — nobody in the readings explicitly mentions it, however.

Yet, let it be. The pulp of CMC is its use of ontologies, even though this word (to my surprise) does not appear more than once in Turoff et al. The authors are dancing the ontological waltz by using synecdoches of the type: “problem-dependent discourse structure” to refer to “ad-hoc ontology” in their sense. But once again it proves the point that ontologies are vital to knowledge engineering and domain reasoning despite external skepticism. This writing thus rejects some of Shirky’s criticisms of, say, semantic hypertext over the web, which according to Shirky do not create knowledge, but confusion. (Apologies to Shirky if I sometimes unintentionally commit myself to straw-man conclusions…) Moreover, the criticism of subjective categorization in Sorting things out when it comes to social issues may very well be mitigated, at least in principle, through voting, as Turoff et al. argue.

Another important implication of CMC-related research is the base-rate question previously asked and subsequently answered. The question related to how often does face-to-face group collaboration yield collective intelligence versus collaboration between globally-distributed teams. Well, research shows that the latter brings about collective intelligence more often. Read, for instance, Bordia’s findings on the matter on top of what Turoff et al. have reported. I wonder whether collective intelligence shall now be excluded from the list of topical concerns discussed in Distance Matters: If what we really care about is collective intelligence to solve tough or rough problems, then how much would distance matter?

If ontologies help organize shared conceptualizations so that individuals/teams distributed globally can reason from them, then CSCW should get the most out of it. The overall point of this blogpost is to reiterate the fact that CSCW is nurtured by various disciplines (social, exact, natural) to nurture in return, as if reciprocating dal vivo, those disciplines.

Which distance matters? Two Gedankenexperiments

Distance matters, certainly not solely distance in a circadian context. As wittingly pointed out by Olson & Olson in Distance Matters, the cultural differences between individuals and teams shall persist for a long period of time, if not forever, for the distance not to matter at all. But I lay out here two thought experiments for the sake of not vanquishing them from my thoughts…

Physical distance in the highly interconnected world we live in should probably be the least of our concerns. What modern organizational entities should focus on is, in my humble opinion, the distance in the context of knowledge: the shared (“common ground”), aligned knowledge amongst individuals in the team and among teams in a larger environment of entities. I wouldn’t dare sound too philosophical, but here’s the first rough thought experiment: We have evolved in a way that physical (close-up) interactions have iteratively shaped our psychology and conscience and vice-versa. In light of such an important biological characteristic of ours, would analog (vs. digital) presence ever not matter?

In a CSCW context, if we disregard individual differences and consider participating entities (individuals or teams) as oblivious to how the environment they belong to dissipates knowledge and information, then we may be able to view such a collaborative world as a complex system wherein adaptation and evolution (towards achieving the ultimate goals) emerge. Thus, I would diverge a little bit with the authors’ conclusion that collaborative work will be almost surely impossible even in the future. Unlike the authors, I have a firm belief that collaborative work among humans can be reduced/constrained to simplistic terms in order to induce onto them a self-organizing system—same principle applies to multi-agent, distributed systems… That would be my second and last gedankenexperiment for this post.