Research Concept

In the time of increasingly spread and interactive value-creation processes, successful collaboration in groups plays a significant role in the fight for competitive advantages in various sectors and topics. Collaboration Engineering is a systematic approach for the development and implementation of collaborative work practices, which are performed by practitioners to complete high-value recurring tasks. The goal is to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the participants as well as achieving high quality results.

The use of information technology provides new, promising perspectives, which led and will lead to significant changes in human collaboration in both companies and public sector. The work group of Information Systems, especially Socio-Technical System Design, is concerned with the design of collaboration processes and practices for knowledge-intensive activities across different sectors and fields of application using the possibilities of modern ICT (e.g. group support systems for location-based and distributed collaboration, conversational agents and non-human collaboration partners, integration of collaboration tools in work processes, mass collaboration on platforms).

Besides references to the established research area Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), a further focus lays on the consideration and design of novel forms of collaboration, e.g. in human-machine collaboration, in virtual teams or social networks. Increasing digitalisation of classic forms of work and the application potential of novel IT-Tools (e.g. artificial intelligence und language technology for natural language-based agents, mobile technologies, graphic and haptic group support systems) are selected examples of current research topics of increasing relevance.
The work group WISTS conducts design-oriented research in this topic area using the spectrum of methods provided by Information Systems and related disciplines from the analysis of real-world problems, to conception, evaluation and introduction of solutions in laboratory and case studies.