This page looks at Communities of Practice as Distributed Collaborative Work and asks (a) are CoPs collaborative and (b) can they be distributed? (Selected and reviwed links to papers on CoPs)
This paper examines the nature of virtual teams and their place in the networked economy. It presents a framework for categorising virtual teams and argues that fundamental changes have taken place in the business environment which force people and organi
Virtual Teams are seen as project or task focused groups. Team membership may be relatively stable (e.g. in an established sales team) or change on a regular basis (e.g. in project teams). Members may be drawn from the same organization or from several di
This paper provides an overview of virtual teams in the information age, focussing on the definition of virtual teams, their salient characteristics, the communication issues they face (including information overload, geographic and social distance), th
Contains links to papers on KM/CoPs that are all:(a) examples of research undertaken in the MIS Group (b) refereed as part of a book, journal or refereed conference (c) available on line
The aim of this section of the module is to introduce (a) the background and motivation behind this move and (b) some basic concepts for understanding the type of work that can be found in this new environment.
In this article we want to underline the fact that standardization is only one of the most important coordination processes within organizations, and two other processes are needed: coordination by plan and coordination by mutual adaptation.
This paper examines the nature of virtual teams and their place in the networked economy. Using the evidence from two recent sets of studies, it highlights some of the barriers to effective virtual team working and demonstrates the critical importance of
People used to be able to interrupt you at work only by phoning or walking into your office. Now they can do so by e-mail, instant messaging, mobile phones and BlackBerries or personal digital assistants.
Links to Chris Kimble's, research (CMC, CSCW, Knowledge Management, Distributed Teams); teaching (MIS, CIS HI2), and administration (Computer Science, Management)
Telework (or home based work) is a form of work that involves interaction with others but is performed 'off-line', i.e. telework is usually seen as an example of cold distributed collaborative working. A literal definition of telework is "working at a dis