A collaborative work system (CWS) is an organizational unit that emerges any time that collaboration takes place, whether it is formal or informal, intentional or unintentional.[1]
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Collaborative work systems are those in which conscious efforts have been made to create strategies, policies, and structures as well as to institutionalize values, behaviors, and practices that promote cooperation among different parties in an organization in order to achieve organizational goals. A high level of collaborative capacity will enable more effective work at the local and daily levels and at the global and long-term levels.
Beyerlein, et al. (2002)[1] defines collaboration as the collective work of two or more individuals where the work is undertaken with a sense of shared purpose and direction, that is attentive and responsive to the environment. In most organizations collaboration occurs naturally, but ill-defined work practices may create barriers to collaboration occurring naturally. The result is a loss of decision-making quality and time. Well designed collaborative working systems not only overcome these natural barriers to communication, they establish a cooperative work culture that becomes an integral part of the organization's structure[2].
A collaborative work system is related to a collaborative working environment (CWE). The latter notion has more of a technology focus and was issued from the concept of collaborative workspaces[3] driven from research within the MOSAIC Project.
A collaborative working system is broader in concept than a collaborative working environment. The notion of a "system" has a self explanatory power that is better than that of an "environment". Whereas the former pertains to an integrated whole, including collaborative work conceived as a mean of a purposeful activity, the later stresses the surroundings of an object - the collaborative working practices - that include a diversified number of tools and software applications mostly for remote collaboration, including video-conferencing, document and workflow management, blogging, etc. As the authors state: "Issued from the concept of virtual workspaces the concept of CWE strongly relates to the concept of e-work".
A collaborative working system generally includes a collaborative working environment, but it must also be conceived as a set of human activities, intentional or not, that emerge every time collaboration occurs. This focus on the work practices needed for collaboration draws attention to important behavioral variables such as leadership and motivation that are not considered within the CWE perspective.
Besides participatory leadership, another key element of a successful collaborative work system is the availability of group collaboration technology or groupware - hardware and software tools that help groups to access and share the information they need to meet, train or teach.
However a collaborative work system (CWS) does not necessarily require groupware support. A simple way to conceptualize the relation between the two concepts is to consider computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) as a whole consisting of a collaborative work system (CWS) supported by collaborative software or groupware.
On the other hand, a collaborative working environment which supports people in both their individual and cooperative work, whatever their geographical location, transcends the notion of CSCW which deals specifically with cooperative work.