A Goal-Oriented Approach for Designing Collaboration Processes

Although Group Support Systems (GSSs) have been studied and developed for many years, they are not widely used in practice. One of the challenges of using GSSs is that extensive knowledge and expertise are needed in order to design effective collaboration processes. Research has sought to make this knowledge available to practitioners by introducing modules of collaboration called thinkLets, however, facilitation expertise is often still needed to select the correct thinkLet(s) for a given group activity. We propose an approach for designing collaboration processes that makes use of multi-criteria decision making, decision-tree models, and goal programming. The effectiveness of our approach was evaluated by comparing collaboration process designs developed by people using our prototype with those by people using detailed written documentation. We found that our approach significantly improves the efficiency of the collaboration process design procedure by guiding practitioners in choosing the best combination of thinkLets.