Abstract:

In interdisciplinary research teams, communication, coordination and collaboration among team members often faces challenges due to the different educational background, language and work processes of the various team members. In order to cope with these difficulties, IBBT, the Flemish Interdisciplinary Institute for Broadband Technology, implemented an online computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) platform. This online environment was developed with the help of user and expert feedback gathered through continuous research in the last three years. The IBBT CSCW platform is called MyBBT and is based on the Open Source Enterprise Content Management System Alfresco. The functionality provided by MyBBT includes, amongst others, document libraries, wiki pages, discussion boards and calendar functions. Today, the MyBBT platform has almost 900 registered users working in four research domains: Culture & Media, eHealth, Green ICT and Mobility & Logistics.

In February 2011, 18 months after the platform was launched, we organized an online user satisfaction survey reaching 25% (N: 218) of the MyBBT users. Seven out of ten respondents evaluated the MyBBT platform as ‘Good’ or ‘Very Good’ and less than 5% rated the platform as (very) poor.

In this paper we will try to indicate the most important barriers for the improvement of integrated CSCW platforms. In the first section of this paper, we will distinguish some obstacles and difficulties that CSCW designers have to keep in mind. In the second section of this paper we will reconsider the data from the MyBBT user satisfaction survey and relate it to the literature. To be more precise, we will test to what extent users’ dissatisfaction with MyBBT can be explained by people’s preferences for simple and already known single focused management tools. Our second research question looks at the presumed inhibitory nature of interdisciplinary work and research. Our results, presented in this paper, shed light on some user-related factors that influence the successful implementation of integrated CSCW platforms in large interdisciplinary organizations.

Keywords:

CSCW, groupware, interdisciplinarity.