Investigating collaborative information behaviours in complex product development work

Modern engineering projects are increasingly collaborative,often developed over a network of organisations and involving multiple actors and stakeholders. Actors in such projects are dependent on multiple contextual factors which include technologies, processes and procedures. The outcomes of such projects are dependent on how actors interact with these contextual factors. However,this dependency remains poorly understood and, as a result, it is difficult to assess the impact of collaborative aspects of information behaviours on engineering projects. In this paper I outline an activity theory (Engestrom, 1987; Allen et al., 2011)approach to assess the tensions and disruptions affecting collaboration. I apply this approach to the cases of product development in two high value engineering organisations. Through this approach, I reveal that engineers consistently adapt their collaborative information behaviours in response to tensions caused by technologies originally introduced to support their work. As a result, I show that this introduces significant practicaldisruptionstocomplex projects. I propose that these disruptions can be generalised across a range of industries and should be considered as significant factors for professionals seeking to diagnose disruptions to information flows. Identifying these disruptions, through activity theory, provides a first step to more effective design and implementation of information systems,collaborative work processes and workflows.