Facilitator-in-a-Box: Process Support Applications to Help Practitioners Realize the Potential of Collaboration Technology
Authors: Briggs, Robert O.; Kolfschoten, Gwendolyn L.; de Vreede, Gert-Jan; Lukosch, Stephan; Albrecht, Conan C.
Journal: Journal of Management Information Systems (2013)
DOI: 10.2753/mis0742-1222290406
The potential benefits of collaboration technologies are typically realized only in groups led by collaboration experts. This raises the facilitator-in-the-box challenge: Can collaboration expertise be packaged with collaboration technology in a form that nonexperts can reuse with no training on either tools or techniques? We address that challenge with process support applications (PSAs). We describe a collaboration support system (CSS) that combines a computer-assisted collaboration engineering platform for creating PSAs with a process support system runtime platform for executing PSAs. We show that the CSS meets its design goals: (1) to reduce development cycles for collaboration systems, (2) to allow nonprogrammers to design and develop PSAs, and (3) to package enough expertise in the tools that nonexperts could execute a well-designed collaborative work process without training.