A collaborative work system (CWS) is an organizational unit that emerges any time that collaboration takes place, whether it is formal or informal, intentional or unintentional.

Overview

Collaborative work systems are those in which conscious efforts have been made to create strategies, policies, and structures as well as to institutionalize values, behaviors, and practices that promote cooperation among different parties in an organization in order to achieve organizational goals. A high level of collaborative capacity will enable more effective work at the local and daily levels and at the global and long-term levels.

Beyerlein, et al. (2002) defines collaboration as the collective work of two or more individuals where the work is undertaken with a sense of shared purpose and direction, that is attentive and responsive to the environment. In most organizations collaboration occurs naturally, but ill-defined work practices may create barriers to collaboration occurring naturally. The result is a loss of decision-making quality and time. Well designed collaborative working systems not only overcome these natural barriers to communication, they establish a cooperative work culture that becomes an integral part of the organization's structure.

CWS and collaborative working environments

A collaborative work system is related to a collaborative working environment

Collaborative Working Environment

A collaborative working environment supports people in their individual and cooperative work. Research in CWE involves organisational, technical, and social issues....

 (CWE). The latter notion has more of a technology focus and was issued from the concept of collaborative workspace

Collaborative workspace

A collaborative workspace or shared workspace is an inter-connected environment in which all the participants in dispersed locations can access and interact with each other just as inside a single entity....

s driven from research within the MOSAIC Project.

A collaborative working system is broader in concept than a collaborative working environment. The notion of a "system

System

System is a set of interacting or interdependent components forming an integrated whole....

" has a self explanatory power that is better than that of an "environment

Environment (systems)

In science and engineering, a system is the part of the universe that is being studied, while the environment is the remainder of the universe that lies outside the boundaries of the system. It is also known as the surroundings, and in thermodynamics, as the reservoir...

". Whereas the former pertains to an integrated whole, including collaborative work conceived as a mean of a purposeful activity, the later stresses the surroundings of an object - the collaborative working practices - that include a diversified number of tools and software applications mostly for remote collaboration, including video-conferencing, document and workflow management, blogging, etc. As the authors state: "Issued from the concept of virtual workspaces the concept of CWE strongly relates to the concept of e-work".

A collaborative working system generally includes a collaborative working environment, but it must also be conceived as a set of human activities, intentional or not, that emerge every time collaboration occurs. This focus on the work practices needed for collaboration draws attention to important behavioral variables such as leadership

Leadership

Leadership has been described as the “process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task". Other in-depth definitions of leadership have also emerged.-Theories:...

 and motivation

Motivation

Motivation is the driving force by which humans achieve their goals. Motivation is said to be intrinsic or extrinsic. The term is generally used for humans but it can also be used to describe the causes for animal behavior as well. This article refers to human motivation...

 that are not considered within the CWE perspective.

CWS and collaborative software (or groupware)

Besides participatory leadership, another key element of a successful collaborative work system is the availability of group collaboration technology or groupware - hardware and software tools that help groups to access and share the information they need to meet, train or teach.

However a collaborative work system (CWS) does not necessarily require groupware support. A simple way to conceptualize the relation between the two concepts is to consider computer supported cooperative work

Computer supported cooperative work

The term computer-supported cooperative work was first coined by Irene Greif and Paul M. Cashman in 1984, at a workshop attended by individuals interested in using technology to support people in their work. At about this same time, in 1987 Dr...

 (CSCW) as a whole consisting of a collaborative work system (CWS) supported by collaborative software

Collaborative software

Collaborative software is computer software designed to help people involved in a common task achieve goals...

 or groupware.

On the other hand, a collaborative working environment which supports people in both their individual and cooperative work, whatever their geographical location, transcends the notion of CSCW which deals specifically with cooperative work.

See also

• Organizational culture
  Organizational culture
  Organizational culture is defined as “A pattern of shared basic assumptions invented, discovered, or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration" that have worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore, to be taught to...
  
  
• Juan A. Botía Blaya, Isabelle Demeure, Paolo Gianrossi, Pedro Garcia Lopez, J. Antonio Martínez Navarro, Eike Michael Meyer, Patrizio Pelliccione and Frédérique Tastet-Cherel, POPEYE: providing collaborative services for ad hoc and spontaneous communities. Service Oriented Computing and Applications, Volume 3, Number 1, 25-45, 2009. http://www.springerlink.com/content/h6l30q558j27r482