Adoption of collaboration information technologies in Australian and US organizations: a comparative study

Collaboration to accomplish tasks has taken on a new meaning over the past few years. The majority of organizations are viewing information technology (IT) as a key enabler to transcend time and distance barriers to collaborate efficiently and effectively. Despite this, we know very little about the macro level adoption of IT to support collaboration. This paper assesses the pattern of adoption of seven IT clusters to support task-oriented collaboration in US and Australian organizations. Data collected from one hundred and forty Australian organizations and one hundred and nineteen US organizations is analyzed to compare adoption patterns. Our results suggest that stand-alone e-mail systems, audio teleconferencing systems, and videoconferencing are the most widely adopted technologies to support collaboration in both countries while Web-based tools and electronic meeting systems are the least commonly adopted. A further analysis of data suggests that promotion of collaboration, mode of collaboration, and the adoption of some IT clusters are affected by region. Implications of these findings are discussed along with some directions for practice and research.

1. Introduction

Although the majority of modern organizations depend upon groups to accomplish tasks, collaboration amongst work group members can be challenging, especially in distributed environments. Fortunately, information and networking technologies may help provide a solution for group members in organizations who want to collaborate on tasks effectively and efficiently irrespective of time and distance barriers. Many organizations are successfully deploying IT to support collaboration between dispersed work groups [5]. Despite these trends, there have been no large-scale investigations on the pattern of adoption of IT solutions that have the capability to support task-oriented group collaboration.