Modeling Characteristics in the Design of E-Collaboration Systems

Introduction

E-collaboration is broadly defined as “structured virtual team communication activities through the use of electronic tools, such as blogs, groupware, online meetings, portals, and instant messaging” (Abrantes et al., 2018). With the globalization of the economy, market deregulation has prompted companies to expand into new foreign markets, but the new markets are usually remote markets, which leads to a decentralized work environment and makes it difficult for employees in different parts of the same company to communicate and collaborate. In addition to this, the constant innovation in product quality and shortening life cycles have led to changes in the way many companies work, requiring them to experiment with new organizational structures. Therefore, people have to rely on e-collaboration systems to create a shared virtual work environment, sharing the same information and environment with colleagues who cannot work directly to complete corporate projects (Rodi, 2020).

With the impact of the COVID-19, working from home has become the dominant way for employees in many companies. Online collaboration software, such as Zoom, Tencent conference, Skype, Teams, Flybook, are rising rapidly. According to statistics, in the outbreak of the epidemic within a year, Zoom has over 300 million daily active users (DAUs). E-collaboration system has been inseparable from people’s work and learning. There are many synonyms used interchangeably for e-collaboration systems, e.g. groupware, group support systems, collaborative systems, cooperative information systems.

The four characteristics of e-collaborative systems, namely Coordination, Communication, Collaboration, and Connection(also known as 4Cs), have been identified in the past by Cook(2008) and Riemer(2010). These characteristics suggest that in comparison with other types of internet-based system, e-collaboration systems place more emphasis on the collaborations and interactions among heterogonous stakeholders (Hasani-Mavriqi et al., 2018). E-collaboration systems, such as e-participation systems, e-procurements systems, have been applied to a large number of domains, including environment (Lavender et al., 2016), education (Yussiff et al., 2017), commerce (Lai et al., 2018), transport (Sanchez-Paredes et al., 2018), healthcare (Fedushko et al., 2020), and so on.

Yet, designing e-collaboration systems is not an easy task (Lück et al., 2020), due to the fact that e-collaboration systems involve a large amount of stakeholders from different organizations with numerous, spatially distributed locations and the complex interconnections (Bettoni et al., 2016). Those stakeholders have divergent goals and are responsible for different kinds of business functions of the e-collaboration system; even their perceptions of reality vary significantly. Bringing all stakeholders together and reaching an overall agreement on the design specifications usually proves time-consuming or even impossible. Consequently, designing e-collaboration systems is usually more difficult than that of other system types. It is well known that building design models plays a crucial role in the software development process. Without correct and design models, systems designs usually becomes problematic.