To start the new research year Prof. Petra Schubert and Prof. Susan Williams participated in the 58th Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS58). They presented a paper jointly authored by Petra Schubert, Susan Williams, Martin Just, Jens Alberts and Sebastian Bahles that reports on our latest research into the use of digital trace data to understand how organisations use collaboration technologies to support joint work.
The paper, entitled “How Are Employees Using Collaboration Software to Support Their Work? A Method for Analyzing Digital Traces in Enterprise Collaboration Systems” presents the development of a novel method for investigating the digital traces of collaborative user activity in large-scale Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS). Guided by existing research, we developed a classification metric (Collaborative Work Codes) to describe the type of work that can be identified in the event logs of collaboration software. Following a Design Science Research approach, a computational technique was developed to assign the Collaborative Work Codes to event records and was applied to two ECS datasets (the first provided by a research group, the second by a large German manufacturing company). The combined data was then imported into a dashboard and used to evaluate the coding method and the suitability of the codes for analysis. The findings show that the codes appropriately reflect the type of work carried out by the users and offer a promising baseline for future research, as they allow a system-agnostic classification of events from collaboration software and are applicable for analysis on different levels (e. g. systems, workspaces or users). This allows comparisons of collaborative work across system boundaries in multiple organizations to understand different aspects of collaborative work, for example knowledge-sharing practices. These analyses, and an in-depth analysis of changes over time are currently being conducted by the CEIR research team.
As usual, the HICSS conference was a wonderful experience. Our paper received positive feedback and generated a lot of discussion in coffee breaks, where we had the opportunity to catch up with colleagues from around the world.
The published paper is available for download [https://hdl.handle.net/10125/109146]:
Schubert, P., Williams, S.P., Just, M,, Alberts, J. and Bahles, S. (2025) How Are Employees Using Collaboration Software to Support Their Work? A Method for Analyzing Digital Traces in Enterprise Collaboration Systems. In: Proceedings of the 58th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 7-10 January 2025, Waikaloa, Hawaii, pp. 2522-2531.