Analysing the Digital Traces of Collaborative Work in Large-Scale Enterprise Collaboration Systems

In this chapter, we present an overview of our work to investigate transformations to work processes and work practices arising from the appropriation and use of collaboration technologies to support distributed work in organisations. We begin with an overview of the emerging collaboration technology landscape and present the findings of an empirical study to examine the portfolios of collaboration software being used to implement enterprise collaboration platforms (ECP) in organisations. We explain how the ECP enables organisational workgroups to form digital workspaces to support different types of collaborative work. We identify several research challenges relating to the investigation of such heterogeneous technological infrastructures and address them through the development of novel methods and tools to i) enable the capture and harmonisation of trace data from ECP, and ii) use the trace data to analyse transformations to collaborative work and work practices.