Preface.(Editorial)

The focus on innovation in today's business world has increased awareness of the crucial role collaboration plays in the workplace. At the same time, business globalization often leads to the geographical separation of teams within an organization, which makes collaboration more difficult. Although collaboration software can bridge time and distance, enabling people to work together in these new situations, for many work processes it brings a lack of flexibility which stifles creativity and innovation. The need to accommodate both formal and informal collaboration has been at the core of the interdisciplinary field of computer-supported cooperative work since it emerged in the mid-80s as a specialty, in part as a reaction to trends in office automation toward formal workflow. The collaboration researchers at IBM Research who contributed to this issue are all part of this tradition, grounding their work in user studies, doing iterative design based on user reactions, and perhaps most important, striving to find ways to support both the formal aspects of work and the informal, inspirational parts.

The papers in this issue are organized in a sequence that starts with a broad overview of business activities, followed by a number of loosely related papers on other aspects of collaboration: an activity-based model of collaboration, two implementation papers on collaboration software, two papers on user studies, and two additional papers that deal with analytics and visualization in support of collaboration. Overall, these …