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Q1 What Are the Two Key Characteristics of Collaboration? 37
“Felix, what are you talking about?” asks Drew.
“Mapplethorpe, my contact at General Sports. He wants to know why those new
disk brakes are so expensive. I’m sorry, but I’ve got to call him. I’ll be back in a few
minutes.”
Felix leaves the room.
Drew looks at Addison.
“Now what?” he asks. “If we go forward, we’ll have to rediscuss everything
when Felix comes back. Maybe we should just take a break?”
Addison shakes her head. “Drew, let’s not. It’s tough for all of us to get to these
meetings. I wasn’t even supposed to be in the office today; I drove in just for this.
I’ve only got a couple of hours before I have to pick up Simone from day care, and we
haven’t done anything yet. Let’s just ignore Felix.”
“OK, Addison, but it isn’t easy to ignore Felix.”
The door opens, and Kelly walks in.
“Hi everyone! How’s it going?” she asks brightly. “Is it OK if I sit in on your
meeting?”

Chapter preview

Business is a social activity. While we often say that organizations accomplish their
strategy, they don’t. People in organizations accomplish strategy by working with other
people, almost always working in groups. People do business with people.
Over the years, technology has increasingly supported group work. In your
grandfather’s day, communication was done using letter, phone, and office
visits. Those technologies were augmented in the 1980s and 1990s with fax and
email and more recently by texting, conference calls, and videoconferencing.
Today, products such as Office 365 provide a wide array of tools to support
collaborative work.
This chapter investigates ways that information systems can support collaboration.
We begin by defining collaboration, discussing collaborative activities, and setting
criteria for successful collaboration. Next, we’ll address the kinds of work that
collaborative teams do. Then we’ll discuss requirements for collaborative information
systems and illustrate important collaborative tools for improving communication and
sharing content. After that, we’ll bring this closer to your needs today and investigate
the use of three different collaboration IS that can improve your student collaborations.
Finally, we’ll wrap up with a discussion of collaboration in 2025!

Q1 What Are the Two Key Characteristics

of Collaboration?

To answer this question, we must first distinguish between the terms cooperation and collabora-
tion. Cooperation is a group of people working together, all doing essentially the same type of
work, to accomplish a job. A group of four painters, each painting a different wall in the same
room, are working cooperatively. Similarly, a group of checkers at the grocery store or clerks at
the post office are working cooperatively to serve customers. A cooperative group can accom-
plish a given task faster than an individual working alone, but the cooperative result is usually
not better in quality than the result of someone working alone.