CALL:  Special issue of JITCAR on IT: Collaboration in Organizations

 

Journal of Information Technology Cases and Applications Research

Special issue on: IT-collaboration in organizations

Guest Editor

Luca Iandoli

Dept. of Business and Managerial Engineering,

University of Naples Federico II

Piazzale Tecchio 80, 80125 Naples (Italy)

Tel: +39 081 7682935

E-mail: [log in to unmask]

 

Within the last decade, mass-collaboration, enabled by Internet-based collaborative

platforms (e.g., open standards development, forums, wikis, and social networks), has

been acknowledged by many experts as one of the most relevant emerging novelties

in the IT world, especially in terms of social impact. Thousands of anonymous users

create and update daily the largest encyclopedia of the world (Wikipedia); distributed

teams formed by thousands of open-source programmers collaborate to develop

software products able to compete with large multinationals; millions of users

exchange massive amounts of digital content through social networking platforms like

Flickr and YouTube; hundreds of thousands of activists contributed to Barack

Obama’s electoral campaign playing a significant role in influencing the electoral

outcome and now pursuing open-lobbying on the Presidential agenda through the

Internet.

 

Such successful stories have motivated many companies and organization to explore

the potential of collaborative platforms to enable easier, cheaper and more pervasive

knowledge sharing and magnification than those supported by traditional IT tools.

This exploration of collaborative platforms is motivated as well by increasing

dissatisfaction with and consequent failure of centralized and highly structured KM

platforms, such as corporate portals and traditional intranets as well as

communication technologies, such as email and Instant Messaging.

There is anecdotal evidence arising from a number of noticeable case studies that

collaborative platforms are more effective than traditional IT tools for knowledge

sharing and creation. By empowering knowledge workers and exploiting patterns of

knowledge socialization, they can create a uniquely accessible body of grass-root

knowledge and effectively frame it, thanks to contributors’ ability to index and tag

contents and localize expertise on the basis of their collective salience and reputation.

While considerable research has addressed on-line communities and, in particular, the

open source movement and Wikipedia, to date we lack adequate theoretical

explanations of mass-collaboration and enough empirical evidence to support the

above claims in an organizational context. There are also some concerns that

organizations and companies may lack some of the critical factors necessary for the

successful emergence of collaborative on-line communities, such as scale,

independence, voluntariness, self-motivation, and absence of centralized control and

hierarchy.

 

In this JITCAR special issue, we are looking to explore the following research

questions: can collaborative platforms increase organizations’ performance and

effectiveness? When do they constitute a viable alternative technology to traditional

KM and communication tools in organizations and when may they fail? Which are the

organizational and cultural requirements needed to successfully introduce mass collaboration

in organizations? We are interested in case and application research

articles that focus on (but are not limited to):

• Organizational and contextual antecedents of e-collaboration: under which

conditions, in which kind of organizations and for which tasks e-collaboration

may thrive/fail;

• Expected and actual Benefits deriving from e-collaboration in terms of

knowledge sharing, creation and magnification;

• E-collaboration and organizational design: incentives to attract and retain

members, community governance, social networks, conflict and coordination

management, new organizational models;

• Collaborative platform start-up: variables influencing the choice,

implementation and successful adoption of collaborative platforms;

• Content management strategies: contents & members quality assessment (trust

& reputation systems), information aggregation (belief aggregation, market-based

aggregation), social tagging and collective information retrieval

• Variables influencing design choice in collaborative platforms.

• Collective knowledge exploitation (e.g. distributed decision making, collective

prediction, group deliberation)

 

This special issue on IT collaboration in organizations is expected to be published in

the fourth quarter 2009 edition of JITCAR. The timetable for submitting manuscripts

for this special issue is as follows:

Submission deadline: June 15, 2009

Notification to authors: October 1, 2009

Final Revisions due: November 20, 2009

Please contact the special issue editor Luca Iandoli, [log in to unmask] , with any

questions. For general information about JITCAR scope and editorial policies please

refer to the journal web page http://faculty.babson.edu/Gordon/jitcar/