Improving the success of sustaining collaborative work practices enabled through information technology

Information technology is altering organizational work practices by empowering employees with new ways of sharing information. This can trigger major organizational change, which can enhance an organization's competitive advantage. Failure to understand an organization's work practices jeopardizes the success of information technology initiatives. Therefore, it is essential that information technology solutions support and enable work practices in the organization.;This research study used an action research methodology to investigate the efficacy of the Value Frequency Model for increasing the likelihood of success for the sustained use of technology-enabled work practices at the United States Strategic Command's Global Innovation and Strategy Center. Collaboration Engineering guided the design of two technology-enabled work practices, which supported a wide range of collaborative tasks. The work practices were executed thirty-six times from July 2007 to February 2008. Analysis from twenty semi-structured interviews, seventy questionnaires, and observations from the work practice execution yielded an expansion of the Value Frequency Model and deepened our understanding of key Collaboration Engineering principles.;Collaboration engineers should create repeatable work practice designs that can be applied to a range of group tasks and executed within a short time period to increase the frequency in which they are executed. The increased frequency will improve the likelihood of success for the sustained use of the work practice in the organization. Our study shows the need to apply the Value Frequency Model to the study of technology-enabled work practices in new contexts and the need to refine a work practice maturity model for understanding the transition stages of work practices in the organization.