preview

Essay on Groupware

Good Essays
Open Document

Groupware

A powerful requirement for businesses to effectively compete in today’s global market place is the ability for collaboration between business units, work teams and individuals. The value of collaboration is its potential to contribute toward increasing productivity, reducing costs, growing profit and improve service or product quality (Alavi, M., 1994). Technology that has been designed to support collaborative group work is referred to as groupware. This impacts on the way people communicate with each other, the way people work and even the structure of an organization.

Groupware are technology based tools that facilitate groups of geographically dispersed people to share knowledge and information using computer based …show more content…

Groupware classified as different time/same place facilitates members who may only be available during certain time periods, yet are in the same relative location. Applications which assist in this include document management and group calendaring applications. Finally different time/different place explains the process of information exchange where group members are present at different times and are situated in different places, for example members who are geographically dispersed and subsequently operate in different time zones. Applications that facilitate this typically include email, voice mail and bulletin boards (Ellis et al., 1991).

Groupware which do not fit into any of the simple to complex scenarios mentioned in the previous paragraph fall under the application level category. These tools focus more on application level functionality and tend to be less comprehensive than the previously discussed tools. This category of groupware according to Ellis et al., (1991) is intended to give a general idea of the breadth of the groupware domain. Ellis et al., (1991) identify six categories of application level tools which include; message systems, multiple user editors, group decision support systems, computer conferencing, intelligent agents and coordination systems (Ellis et al.,

Get Access