9729843 Wright, William F. University of California - Irvine CISE Research Instrumentation :Use of Groupware to Enhance Team Decisions and Achieve Organizational Learning This research instrumentation grant contributes to enable the following projects:- Better Collaborative User of Information Using Groupware: Use of Considerable Information and Use of Multimedia Information,- When will Team Members Collaborate Effectively?: The Impact of Team Leadership and Team Cohesion on Collaborative Use of Groupware, and- Use of Groupware to Acquire Organizational Memory: Framing of Case Descriptions and Incentives for Teams to Contribute. The most important asset of a professional organization is its people: more specifically, their accumulated knowledge and potential insights. When these knowledge workers collaborate, they are achieving learning for themselves and their organization. Groupware (including Intranets) is used to facilitate their collaborative work. The proposed research addresses first how use of groupware will improve both the decision effectiveness and efficiency of collaboration by geographically distributed professionals and second under what conditions will teams make available their decisions and decision processes to permit an organization to acquire, manage and distribute their knowledge. Members of teams of knowledge workers will communicate, exchange information, and make decisions, in the to-be-established Groupware Laboratory for which the networking, workstation and videoconferencing instrumentation is needed. The instrumentation, to be installed in soundproof cubicles, will permit simulation and study of how professionals "interact" using only digital (and voice) interaction when they are geographically distributed. This use of a "digital communication" laboratory permits control of extraneous variables (e.g., access to unknown parties and information) and concentrates on discovery of new causal effects.
