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: luca.iandoli@unina.it
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, luca.iandoli@unina.it , 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/