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Distance, dependencies, and delay in a global collaboration

Published: 01 December 2000 Publication History

Abstract

Collaborations over distance must contend with the loss of the rich, subtle interactions that co-located teams use to coordinate their work. Previous research has suggested that one consequence of this loss is that cross-site work will take longer than comparable single-site work. We use both survey data and data from the change management system to measure the extent of delay in a multi-site software development organization. We also measure site interdependence, differences in same-site and cross-site communication patterns, and analyze the relationship of these variables to delay. Our results show a significant relationship between delay in cross-site work and the degree to which remote colleagues are perceived to help out when workloads are heavy. This result is particularly troubling in light of the finding that workers generally believed they were as helpful to their remote colleagues as to their local colleagues. We discuss implications of our findings for collaboration technology for distributed organizations.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CSCW '00: Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
December 2000
346 pages
ISBN:1581132220
DOI:10.1145/358916
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 01 December 2000

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Author Tags

  1. awareness
  2. delay
  3. global collaboration
  4. informal communication
  5. interdependence
  6. software development
  7. speed

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CSCW00
CSCW00: Computer Supported Cooperative Work
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

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CSCW '00 Paper Acceptance Rate 36 of 199 submissions, 18%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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