Posted on Charity Village in August 2004

This article is a summary of recent research literature on the
benefits and success factors related to dispersed teams. I've been
pulling it together for a couple of projects, and though this month's
column may be dense, the references might be useful for people who are
trying to design collaboration initiatives.

Distance collaboration is difficult to manage successfully (Olson & Olson,
2000), but with the changing nature of work, dispersed teams are ubiquitous
(O'Leary & Cummings, 2004). Most of us don't have a choice – we use phone
and email to communicate with most of our colleagues at least some of the
time. More and more often we're working in dispersed teams, where at least
some people on a project are in a different location from others. A growing
field of research is showing how to manage dispersed teams successfully, and
what the advantages are.

The two major benefits of distance collaboration are in innovation and productivity.
It turns out, not surprisingly, that innovation is more likely to happen when
new ideas are brought into a group. In practice, new ideas are brought in
through the social and work networks of the group members, so for innovation,
you want a group that is linked to diverse external networks through their
various relationships. In fact, diversity seems to be an essential condition
for learning and innovation (Nooteboom & Gilsing, 2004). If you can manage
a dispersed work group, you can systematically pull in a highly diverse team
who can later be assigned to another team, ensuring that new ideas are spread
throughout the organization. See Cummings (2004) for details. It's important
to note that successful innovations also are more likely to happen in organizations
that encourage knowledge sharing with external networks, and encourage group
members to communicate relevant information between each other.

Productivity includes impact as well as efficiency and cost effectiveness.
For example, improved productivity can mean that a team does the same work
faster or cheaper, or it can mean that the team's work is higher quality and
has more impact on the organization. In academic research, productivity could
be measured by impact factors of published papers, research citations, or
number of peer-reviewed articles approved.

Impact and quality is higher when project teams can take advantage of
experts who don't happen to be located nearby (Faraj & Sproull,
2000). This is related to the importance of diverse networks, but it
also is tied to the increased knowledge available to teams who can
engage distant contributors (Majchrzak, Malhotra, Stamps, &
Lipnack, 2004).

Efficiency and cost effectiveness is improved when teams can be built
and managed without moving them all to the same physical location.
Distance collaboration processes, though difficult to establish at the
beginning, can be spread throughout an organization and dramatically
reduce the costs and failure rates of dispersed teams (Beise, 2004;
Powell, Piccoli, & Ives, 2004). Other potential sources of
efficiency include lower costs for training (Kirschner & van
Bruggen, 2004), and if flexible satellite offices are enabled, reduced
costs for physical plans and office occupancies. Note that dispersed
teams are not the same as telecommuting (for discouraging reviews of
telework and productivity, see (Bailey & Kurland, 2002; Westfall,
2004).

Management processes in dispersed teams

Dr. Jonathon Cummings, after many years of studying dispersed teams in major organizations,
summarizes the most important effective management practice thus: “What should
work group leaders make sure to do when members are geographically dispersed
rather than co-located? The empirical evidence…provides one simple answer
– communicate frequently with members,” informally and outside meetings, face
to face if possible and by phone if not. (Cummings, In press)

According
to his research and others', in virtual teams, leaders have a
paradoxical role. They have to provide the interface between the team
and the broader organization, negotiating expectations and resources
between them. They have to provide a constant stream of informal and
formal communication between members to ensure lines of communication
stay open and that problems are identified before they get too serious.
But they also have to allow multiple routes for information flow so
they don't end up as 'bottlenecks'. Some research suggests that many
leaders restrict information flow out of 'ego needs', dramatically
reducing the effectiveness of their teams. In co-located teams, it
might be easier for members to communicate informally even if the
leader is trying to impose too much centralization. In distributed
teams, with less opportunity for informal conversation, this creates a
serious problem for effectiveness and can cripple a team. (Cross,
Parker, & Borgatti, 2002; Cummings, 2004; Cummings & Cross,
2003)

Communication norms within groups include predictability. If people
don't respond to their messages in a reasonable time, the team falls
apart. This is a crucial norm and must be described and enforced. Team
members that break agreements decrease trust, and the performance of
the team is compromised (Aubert & Kelsey, 2003; Piccoli & Ives,
2003). A 'reasonable time' might be defined as within 2 hours in one
project, or within a week in another project, but most sectors have
norms (such as one business day) when specific expectations are not
negotiated.

Project management research suggests that at minimum, teams define
measurable objectives and milestones, and then revise the project as
required based on continued monitoring of those milestones (De Meyer,
Loch, & Pich, 2002). Otherwise distance projects tend to fail
because they are 'out of sight and out of mind' (Fussell, Kiesler,
Setlock, & Scupelli, 2004). Appropriate technology is vital here
because tools like instant messaging can remind team members of the
presence of their colleagues (Majchrzak et al., 2004).

I'm planning to list a number of other management processes that appear to lead
to more successful collaborations, as well as describe the kinds of technology
that are most useful. If you'd like to be kept updated, e-mail me at gkerr at
realworldsystems.net.

References

Aubert, B. A., & Kelsey, B. L. (2003). Further understanding of trust and performance
in virtual teams. Small Group Research, 34(5), 575-618.

Bailey, D. E., & Kurland, N. B. (2002). A review of telework research: Findings,
new directions, and lessons for the study of modern work. Journal Of Organizational
Behavior, 23, 383-400.

Beise, C. M. (2004). IT project management and virtual teams. Paper presented
at the Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Computer personnel research: Careers,
culture, and ethics in a networked environment, Tucson, AZ, US.

Cross, R., Parker, A., & Borgatti, S. (2002). A bird's-eye view: Using social
network analysis to improve knowledge creation and sharing. Executive strategy
reports. Retrieved July 16 2004

Cummings, J. N. (2004). Work groups, structural diversity, and knowledge sharing
in a global organization. Management Science, 50(3), 13.

Cummings, J. N. (In press). Leading groups from a distance: How to mitigate
consequences of geographic dispersion. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers,
Inc.

Cummings, J. N., & Cross, R. (2003). Structural properties of work groups and
their consequences for performance. Social Networks, 25, 197-210.

De Meyer, A., Loch, C. H., & Pich, M. T. (2002). Managing project uncertainty:
From variation to chaos. Mit Sloan Management Review, 43(2), 60-+.

Faraj, S., & Sproull, L. (2000). Coordinating expertise in software development
teams. Management Science, 46(12), 1554-1568.

Fussell, S. R., Kiesler, S., Setlock, L. D., & Scupelli, P. (2004). Effects
of instant messaging on the management of multiple project trajectories.
Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Human factors in
computing systems, Vienna Austria.

Kirschner, P. A., & van Bruggen, J. (2004). Learning and understanding in virtual
teams. Cyberpsychology & Behavior, 7(2), 135-139.

Majchrzak, A., Malhotra, A., Stamps, J., & Lipnack, J. (2004). Can absence make
a team grow stronger. Harvard Business Review, 82(5), 131-+.

Nooteboom, B., & Gilsing, V. A. (2004, 19-Jan-2004). Density and strength of
ties in innovation networks: A competence and governance view. ERIM Report
Series Research in Management Retrieved July 30, 2004, from https://ep.eur.nl/handle/1765/1124.

O'Leary, M. B., & Cummings, J. N. (2004). Geographic dispersion in teams: The
interplay of theory and methods. Unpublished – May 4, 2004, 48.

Olson, G. M., & Olson, J. S. (2000). Distance matters. Human-Computer Interaction,
15(2-3), 139-178.

Piccoli, G., & Ives, B. (2003). Trust and the unintended effects of behavior
control in virtual teams. Mis Quarterly, 27(3), 365-395.

Powell, A., Piccoli, G., & Ives, B. (2004). Virtual teams: A review of current
literature and directions for future research. ACM SIGMIS Database, 35(1),
6-36.

Westfall, R. D. (2004). Does telecommuting really increase productivity? Fifteen
rival hypotheses. Communications of the ACM Volume 47, Issue 8 (August
2004). Retrieved July 30 2004 from http://www.cyberg8t.com/westfalr/prdctvty.html.

Two interviews with George Lakoff, author of  “Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think,” discuss how conservatives and liberals use “framing” – positioning issues to convince the public. He says that conservatives do it much, much better. Here's an excerpt from the 2003 interview:

“Language always comes with what is called 'framing.' Every word is defined relative to a conceptual framework. … The phrase “Tax relief” began coming out of the White House starting on the very day of Bush's inauguration. It got picked up by the newspapers as if it were a neutral term, which it is not. First, you have the frame for “relief.” For there to be relief, there has to be an affliction, an afflicted party, somebody who administers the relief, and an act in which you are relieved of the affliction. The reliever is the hero, and anybody who tries to stop them is the bad guy intent on keeping the affliction going. So, add “tax” to “relief” and you get a metaphor that taxation is an affliction, and anybody against relieving this affliction is a villain.

“”Tax relief” has even been picked up by the Democrats. … You see the Democrats shooting themselves in the foot.

[So what should they be calling it?]

“It's not just about what you call it, if it's the same “it.” There's actually a whole other way to think about it. Taxes are what you pay to be an American, to live in a civilized society that is democratic and offers opportunity, and where there's an infrastructure that has been paid for by previous taxpayers. This is a huge infrastructure. The highway system, the Internet, the TV system, the public education system, the power grid, the system for training scientists — vast amounts of infrastructure that we all use, which has to be maintained and paid for. Taxes are your dues — you pay your dues to be an American. In addition, the wealthiest Americans use that infrastructure more than anyone else, and they use parts of it that other people don't. The federal justice system, for example, is nine-tenths devoted to corporate law. The Securities and Exchange Commission and all the apparatus of the Commerce Department are mainly used by the wealthy. And we're all paying for it.

[So taxes could be framed as an issue of patriotism.]

“It is an issue of patriotism! Are you paying your dues, or are you trying to get something for free at the expense of your country? …. But what would it take to make the discussion about that? Every Democratic senator and all of their aides and every candidate would have to learn how to talk about it that way. There would have to be a manual. Republicans have one. They have a guy named Frank Luntz, who puts out a 500-page manual every year that goes issue by issue on what the logic of the position is from the Republican side, what the other guys' logic is, how to attack it, and what language to use.”

“Within traditional liberalism you have a history of rational thought that was born out of the Enlightenment: all meanings should be literal, and everything should follow logically. So if you just tell people the facts, that should be enough — the truth shall set you free. All people are fully rational, so if you tell them the truth, they should reach the right conclusions. That, of course, has been a disaster.”

Lakoff explains that conservatives build infrastructure like think tanks and public relations machines more effectively than do liberals, as part of the 'strict father' vs. 'nurturing parent' value systems. Fascinating stuff. Lakoff has lots of other examples too.

He is one of the founders of the Rockridge Institute, which aims to “Reframe the terms of political debate to make a progressive moral vision more persuasive and influential.” And he's just completed a practical communication manual, ”Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate,” which will be on Amazon starting September 8.

(Thanks to BoingBoing)

Actually, this is a warning about the ease of finding sensitive information if you know how to use Google. Johnny.ihackstuff.com posts a variety of Google hacking tricks including search strings that pull up usernames and passwords that webmasters have carelessly posted on the public web. Here's an example. (Thanks to Kottke.org).

DropCash is an instant fundraising site that anyone with a PayPal account can use for collecting donations for events, birthdays, charitable organizations or whatever. Besides being a good idea, its credibility is greatly enhanced by being favourably covered by the BoingBoing and Gomi No Sensei blogs.

These two blogs aren't only providing a journalism service, they are endorsing the developers of the DropCash service through their shared membership in a social network.

From BoingBoing: “DropCash is a new service from Jason Kottke and Andre Torrez, two of my favorite Web-dudes. DropCash has the ingenious simplicity of all of Torrez's projects: sign up, enter your TypeKey identity and a fundraising target and click “create” and hey-presto, you've got a fundraising site where anyone with PayPal and TypeKey can contribute — and watch the progress-bar move toward your money goal.”

I haven't tested the service myself. It's in open beta right now.

The Smoking Gun, the popular web site that posts copies of court papers, celebrity contracts and other hard-to-refute evidence, has posted a surveillance clip of a family visit with John Gotti in a federal penitentiary.

It's a wonderful portrait of family dynamics. Watch especially the mother's reaction to her father (the Don) and her 10 year old son. Anyone who's watching the reality TV show 'Growing Up Gotti' should see how they got that way.

CNet announces that a free program called RSSCalendar “allows a user to convert and publish calendar data as an RSS feed. Friends, co-workers and customers can subscribe to the calendar feed and automatically receive notices of new appointments, which can be viewed through an RSS reader or imported to a Web-based calendar or Microsoft Outlook.”

Scheduling meetings appointments is one of the big time-wasters in business life. It would be nice to have some better alternatives to the current scheduling programs, including Microsoft Exchange. RSSCalendar will be more useful when the developer creates a plugin for Outlook.

² focused on the period from 1994 to 2002. It offers evidence that specific management practices foster higher productivity regardless of a company's location, size, sector, or historical performance.³ In essence, the connection between better management practices and improved corporate productivity accounts for the gaps among the four countries in our study and holds true for all of the manufacturers we examined.⁴

“The payoff from improved management is impressive. Our analysis rated 100 randomly selected companies on a scale of 0 to 5 to measure how well they used three important tools: lean manufacturing, which cuts waste in the production process; performance management, which sets clear goals and rewards employees who reach them; and talent management, which attracts and develops high-caliber people.

“Our results indicate that a one-point improvement on the scale was correlated with a 25 percent increase in a company's total factor productivity (a measure that includes both labor and capital productivity). To put this into perspective, such an improvement has an effect comparable to that of raising capital investment by 70 percent, going from 10 manufacturing plants to 17, or increasing the workforce by 25 percent. What's more, companies got the same benefit from improved management regardless of where they ranked on our scale. In other words, even well-managed companies get a big bang from these efforts….

“Compared with those results, how do IT investments stack up? We found that additional computing power⁶ also translated into higher productivity—but the impact was modest. The top quartile of companies, as reckoned by the level of their IT deployment, had a total factor productivity just 4 percent higher, on average, than those in the bottom quartile—just one-sixth of the impact of a one-point improvement in management practices. Moreover, companies with more powerful IT didn't do better financially. That may seem odd, given the rise in productivity, but one likely explanation is that the cost of new IT investments balanced out the financial gain they generated. Again, these results held good regardless of a manufacturer's location, size, or industry.

“Of course, managers shouldn't stop buying computers. Rather, the results show that companies can get the biggest benefit by combining IT investments with good management. For corporations scoring in the bottom quartile of management practices, the deployment of more powerful IT is associated with productivity improvements of just 2 percent. However, companies with increased computing power and improved management practices achieve 20 percent higher productivity (exhibit). This result shows that better management practices can raise productivity a good deal by themselves and increase the impact of IT investments on productivity as well. Companies should first improve their management practices and then invest in IT.”

Next-generation search tools to refine results -  ”The vast corpus of human knowledge could soon be published on the Internet. The problem now is how to wade through it.”

The growth of digital information is far out-stripping our ability to search it. For example, approximately 100 million books have been published in all of human history, representing about 100 terabytes of storage (a terabyte is a million megabytes). There are mass book-scanning projects underway in India and China. And Taiwanese firms are planning to distribute a 2-terabyte flash memory card next year, so as soon as someone scans in the books, we'll be able to fit every book ever written in your mobile phone along with your entire music library.

This article suggests that “universal access to all human knowledge is within our grasp”. In addition, several researchers are experimenting with personal information catalogues: carrying around cameras that record everything they see or hear, and capturing every image, book, movie, song that they experience.

The search challenges are horrendous. Expect to see many weird attempts to categorize and manage information. One good sign is that information scientists are acknowledging how people actually access information.

“File systems will likely begin to disappear as search gains popularity. One of the phenomena that Microsoft researchers are finding in MyLifeBits is that files are largely ad hoc categories that become outdated, said Jim Gemmell at Microsoft Research.

“Instead, data should be tagged so that if people remember a name or part of a name, they can find their way back to documents or pictures involving that person, or they can find documents created on the same day that they had a phone conversation with the person, even if the discussion involved something unrelated.”

Economist.com | Scientific publishing – Detailed article from the economist on the pressures coming down on the expensive scientific publishers.  Excerpt – “The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee [in the UK] did more than just lament the rising price of journals. It told the British government that the country's universities should be required to ensure that all their research papers are available free online, and that government-funded research grants ought to include free access to the findings a condition of the awards. The government will respond next month.

“American politicians, too, are getting cross. Earlier this month the House of Representatives' Committee on Appropriations approved a provision in a bill that backs open access to material published by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The committee expressed concern at the lack of public access to research findings, and at the rising price of journals. These, it commented, were “contrary to the best interests of the US taxpayers who paid for this research”.

“If the Senate approves the recommendation, it will become law and the NIH will be required to deposit research funded by the agency into an online government archive called PubMed Central within six months of publication in any journal. If this happens, it will be significant, since NIH-funded work amounts to 50,000 papers a year.  …

“At the moment, the entire open access literature is tiny—less than 1% of what is published according to the Public Library of Science. But if governments were to insist that the results of research they fund must be published in an open-access way, that would change completely. The days of huge profits would then be numbered. Prestige has its uses—and the open-access journals will, no doubt, establish a pecking-order among themselves fairly quickly. But for prestige at any price, time is probably up.”

IHT: Finland says its troops are addicted to Internet – the conscription division at the Finnish armed forces say that young people who are always on the internet are unsuited for the army. “They get up around noon and have neither friends  nor hobbies.” The military doesn't know exactly how many conscripts have been dismissed for internet problems because there's no relevant code for it in their health records. Hmm.

For those of us with failing vision, it's harder and harder to read the teeny print on web sites. When I switched to blogware (now hosting the blog you're reading now), I tested the text resizing ability and it worked perfectly – in Mozilla Firefox. That's a new browser that meets HTML standards better than Internet Explorer, and many people are switching over to it because it may prevent the distribution of viruses.

Unfortunately, text resizing isn't working in Internet Explorer, which most people use. Tris Hussey is helping me figure this out (it's something to do with Cascading Style Sheets), but in the meantime I've found an interesting article on how to address this very common accessibility problem.

MercuryNews.com | 08/01/2004 | We the media
Dan Gilmore's new book, “We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the
People, for the People”,  describes the growing, and potential,
impact of 'citizen journalism' as it is manifested in weblogs and other
internet channels. Excerpt:

“Tomorrow's news reporting and production
will be more of a conversation, or a seminar. The lines will blur
between producers and consumers, changing the role of both in ways
we're only beginning to grasp now. The communication network itself
will be a medium for everyone's voice, not just the few who can afford
to buy multimillion-dollar printing presses, launch satellites, or win
the government's permission to squat on the public's airwaves.

“This evolution will force the various communities of interest to
adapt. Everyone, from journalists to the people we cover to our sources
and the former audience, must change their ways.”

InfoWorld: Tragedy of the network commons: July 30, 2004: By Jon Udell : SECURITY

This article is very funny, and worth reading for anyone who is concerned about security on a network or extranet. Some excerpts:

“A recent survey found that 75 percent of Dartmouth students have shared their network passwords. “They like having people who know their password,” explained Denise Anthony, a sociologist who spoke at the PKI summit conference I attended earlier this month. “They like having someone who can check their e-mail for them or log them in to places where they’re supposed to be.”
“It’s a given that most people take the path of least resistance. So, for example, two-thirds of Dartmouth students never change their passwords during their four years of enrollment. And most reuse their internal passwords for external sites such as The New York Times and Amazon.com. How do they perceive the risk associated with such behavior? According to Anthony, it’s a tragedy of the commons. The network is a collective resource, but people connected to the network feel that they’re consuming a private good. Their subjective view, she says, is this: “I’m in my office. I’m using my computer. It doesn’t feel like I’m part of a group. I don’t recognize how my behavior affects you.””

One of the article's conclusions is that “it was a really smart move to attach a sociologist to Dartmouth’s PKI research group. As security technologists, we’re easily dazzled by our shiny cryptographic swords. But while we’re brandishing our swords, our users — like Indiana Jones in that famous scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark — might simply pull out their guns and shoot us. Better security protocols alone can’t thwart such game-changing behavior. We need to understand what motivates the behavior and figure out which carrots and sticks will influence it.” A beautiful piece of research, and very important. 

Boing Boing: Psy-ops to calm traffic Monday, August 2, 2004 Psy-ops to calm traffic The UK's Transport Research Laboratory is exploring ways to create the illusion of danger on roads in an effort to slow speeders. According to lead researcher Janet Kennedy, simple things such as removing central white lines have already proven successful in psyching out drivers: “Perceptual techniques which make the environment seem more complex or less safe have the potential for success. Natural traffic calming, such as narrow or winding roads, can be very effective as well as being more acceptable to drivers. Carefully-designed schemes, using the properties of natural traffic calming, have the potential to achieve a similar effect.” Link