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Distance, dependencies, and delay in a global collaboration

Authors:

James D. Herbsleb,

Thomas A. Finholt,

Rebecca E. GrinterAuthors Info & Claims

CSCW '00: Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work

Pages 319 - 328

https://doi.org/10.1145/358916.359003

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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Distance, dependencies, and delay in a global collaboration

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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

Chairmen:
Wendy Kellogg
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
,
Steve Whittaker
AT&T Labs-Research

Copyright © 2000 ACM.

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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CSCW '00 Paper Acceptance Rate 36 of 199 submissions, 18%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643672
Maquil VAnastasiou DAfkari HCoppens AHermen JSchwartz L(2023)Establishing Awareness through Pointing Gestures during Collaborative Decision-Making in a Wall-Display EnvironmentExtended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544549.3585830(1-7)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544549.3585830
Pal K(2022)A Review of the Coronavirus Impact on Higher Education Institutions and Opportunity of Information Technology Applications in Collaborative WorkPreparing Faculty for Technology Dependency in the Post-COVID-19 Era10.4018/978-1-7998-9235-9.ch007(111-137)Online publication date: 4-Feb-2022
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-9235-9.ch007
Wang DMuller MYang QWang ZTan MHobson S(2022)Organizational Distance Also MattersProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35555546:CSCW2(1-18)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
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Chattopadhyay ARyan DPockrandt J(2022)Scaffolded Live Coding: A Hybrid Pedagogical Approach for Enhanced Teaching of Coding Skills2022 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)10.1109/FIE56618.2022.9962513(1-9)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2022
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