ABOUT CREATIVITY IN COLLABORATIVE SYSTEMS

Why it Matters and How it can be Supported

Marius Ioan Podean, Dan Benta and Lucia Rusu

Business Information Systems Department, Faculty of Economics and Business Administrations, Babes-Bolyai University

Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Keywords:

Collaboration, Creativity, Content management, Project and risk management, XML technologies.

Abstract:

Collaboration is about creating a shared understanding and build on sparks of dissent. Generate insight,

new ideas or new artifacts is the rationality behind collaboration. Collaboration is based on communication,

coordination and cooperation but extra components are still missing in order to allow team members to express

their creativity. Creativity is goal bounded and requires that alternatives are analyzed and relevant ones selected

and followed. It requires externalization objects to store mental efforts and form the basis for critique and

negotiation. This aspect of collaboration requires tools like project and risk management and especially a

ﬂexible and integrated method of handling content.

1 INTRODUCTION

The term collaboration is used often when one refers

to quite different aspects of working together, like co-

operation or even communication. Collaboration de-

rives from the Latin collaborare that means to work

together and can be seen as a process of shared cre-

ation. In a general sense collaboration represents the

act of working with other persons in order to accom-

plish a common goal. The act of collaboration can be

viewed from multiple perspectives depending on the

aspects on which we focus our attention.

Collaborative systems handle collaboration

mainly without taking one essential characteristic

into consideration, namely creativity and creative

insight. Collaboration is based on building a shared

understanding starting from different points of view

and uses consensus building to negotiate the content.

This process requires tools to organize the work, but

requires also an integrated content management solu-

tion so ﬂexible that will serve users as an extension of

their thinking process. In this paper we will analyze

the requirements for such a collaborative system and

provide an overview of our model that handle these

issues.

The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 iden-

tiﬁes what collaboration represents and what does it

mean efﬁcient collaboration. It also discusses one

main drive element, namely creativity and its prereq-

uisites. Based on these ﬁndings, Section 3 will prese-

nt our model of collaborative system, and discuss the

identiﬁed components. Section 4 draws some conclu-

sions and describes future plans for the model.

2 COLLABORATION

In this section we will present some deﬁnitions for

collaboration and identify elements that represent the

backbone of collaborative processes and focus our at-

tention on one particularly element, creativity.

2.1 Deﬁning Collaboration

Focusing on national programs that involve agencies

David Osher in (Osher, 2002) identiﬁes collaboration

as being the most sophisticated level of relationship

because it requires efforts to unite people and organi-

zations in order to achieve common goals that could

not be achieved by any single individual or organiza-

tion acting alone.

On the other hand, in (Camarinha-Matos and Af-

sarmanesh, 2008) collaboration is regarded from a

more project management oriented point of view fo-

cusing on the elements required to achieve this level

of relationship. Collaboration is identiﬁed as a pro-

cess in which entities share information, resources

and responsibilities to jointly plan, implement, and

evaluate a program of activities to achieve a common

goal. Following this author, collaboration is a process

151

Ioan Podean M., Benta D. and Rusu L..

ABOUT CREATIVITY IN COLLABORATIVE SYSTEMS - Why it Matters and How it can be Supported.

DOI: 10.5220/0003524501510154

In Proceedings of the International Conference on e-Business (ICE-B-2011), pages 151-154

ISBN: 978-989-8425-70-6

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

of shared creation that involves mutual engagement

of participants to solve a problem together and im-

plies sharing risks, resources, responsibilities, and re-

wards. Sharing risks, resources, responsibilities, and

rewards can also give the group to an outside observer

the image of a joint identity.

This approach implies that collaboration is more

than what will later see that is identiﬁed as coopera-

tion by adding joint identity and novelty to the goal.

Michael Schrange in his Shared Minds (Schrage,

1990) focuses especially on this noveltyof the group’s

goal. Schrange considers collaborationas a process of

shared creation: two or more individuals with com-

plementary skills interacting to create a shared under-

standing that none had previously possessed or could

have come to on their own.

Collaboration is often confused with coopera-

tion. Because for many people the two terms are in-

distinguishable (Camarinha-Matos and Afsarmanesh,

2008), in the following we will take a closer look at

what collaboration is and how can it be attained. One

general accepted model that describes what is collab-

oration and what are its main components is the 3C

Collaboration Model (Camarinha-Matos and Afsar-

manesh, 2008). This model states that collaboration

is attainable by implementing three main processes:

communication (networking), coordination and coop-

eration.

Communication (Fuks et al., 2008) is the starting

process in each collaborative process. It is a general

belief that efﬁcient or so to say “ideal” communi-

cation will provide better common understanding or

agreement but when people communicate accurately

they realize more precisely the differences that exist

on their perspectives of the concepts in use (Denise,

1999). Different types of agreement tend to mask the

differences in perception that accurate communica-

tion would uncover.

The second process required by the 3C model

is coordination. Coordination refers to (Fuks et al.,

2008) the management of people, their activities and

resources. Coordination allows team members to

manage conﬂicts and activities in order to increase the

efﬁciency of communication and cooperation efforts.

Networking or communication is used as a founda-

tion (Wolff, 2005) but involves also altering activities

for mutual beneﬁt and for a common goal. It also

increases resource usage efﬁciency and the ability to

meet the targets.

Cooperation refers to the interaction among group

members in order to produce, manipulate, and orga-

nize information, or build and reﬁne cooperation ob-

jects like documents, spreadsheets etc. (Fuks et al.,

2008) This process requires a shared workspace that

should provide the required tool in order to manage

these artifacts, tools like version and access control

and authorization. The shared workspace is very im-

portant because it allows group members to count on

group memory and it provides also some basic aware-

ness mechanisms.

Cooperation, coordination and collaboration are

often used interchangeably, but they should be de-

scribing different stages in the transformation of the

relationship between groups and organizations (Os-

her, 2002). The backbone of collaboration is not the

process of relationship but the strict following of a

speciﬁc result (Denise, 1999).

2.2 Creativity

The rationality behind collaboration is creativity. Cre-

ativity, and especially scientiﬁc creativity, is a process

of achieving an outcome that is recognized as innova-

tive by the relevant community. As deﬁned by Csik-

szentmihalyi in (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997), this pro-

cess does not happen inside one person’s head, but

in the interaction between that person’s thoughts and

a socio-cultural context.

Creativity can refer to the work of artists, but can

also refer to everyday problem-solving abilities. This

type of creativity is essentially equally important be-

cause enables people to become more productive and

create better results. Farooq (Farooq et al., 2005)

identiﬁed as essential requirements for creativity the

followings:

1. support divergent and convergent thinking;

2. support development of shared objectives;

3. support reﬂexivity: obtaining immediate feedback

is essential in having complete involvement in the

task at hand (Csikszentmihalyi, 2008). In the con-

text of a group this refers to the extent to which

members collectively reﬂect on the group’s objec-

tives. This process is known as reﬂexivity and

consists of three elements: reﬂection, planning

and action or adaptation.

Reﬂection is based on critical thinking because it

implies evaluating what divergent thinking offers, ﬁl-

ters it using acceptability criteria and selects the ideas

that will be further taken in consideration. Planning

creates conceptual readiness for relevant opportuni-

ties and guides group member’ attention towards ac-

tions and means to accomplish goals. In order to pro-

vide support for this issue, tools from project man-

agement must be implemented. Action or adaptation

refers to the continuously renegotiation of group’s re-

ality during interaction between group members, and

members and environment. Adaptation consists in

ICE-B 2011 - International Conference on e-Business

152

goal-directed behaviors that are relevant to achiev-

ing the required changes in group objectives, strate-

gies and processes identiﬁed by the group during the

stage of reﬂection. An integrated risk management

approach can take care of the details implied by adap-

tation.

Externalization objects are essential to collabora-

tion (Arias et al., 2000) because they a) create and

store a record of our mental efforts, record that is out-

side the memory; and b) represent artifacts that pro-

vide us information and form the basis for critique

and negotiation. Very important assets for a group or

organization are not only the results but also the way

people think, the way they get to god results. It is a

great challenge to try to capture the thinking process

in tools that are very easy and intuitive to use.

3 THE FOURTH “C”

Following what we have discussed earlier, we con-

sider that an extra element must be added to the 3C

model of collaboration, namely “Creativity”. In or-

der to support creativity in collaborative systems we

consider that a) integrated light-weight project and

risk management, and b) ﬂexible content management

tools have to be implemented.

Figure 1: The 4C Collaboration model.

In order to discuss about collaboration, a key pre-

requisite must be satisﬁed, namely having a joint/

compatible goal or problem to solve (it is not

enough that parties have their own individual goals)

(Camarinha-Matos and Afsarmanesh, 2008). A vi-

sion speciﬁes the scope and extent of these beneﬁts

but does not provide the means to attain them. Project

management is a tool used to provide a team the capa-

bilities required to produce the beneﬁts deﬁned by vi-

sion (Hilson, 2006). Vision delineates a strategy and

project management sets the tactics by detailing the

steps required to put it in practice. Teams can suc-

cessfully implement their vision if they can bind it

with the tactics.

Divergent and convergent thinking is one essen-

tial requirement for creativity and since full consensus

may not always be achievable and sometimes has to

be replaced by informed compromises, some aspects

from risk management can be used to support the col-

laborative process. Hilson (Hilson, 2006) identiﬁed

that a “zero risk” zone not also that it does not ex-

ist, but it is not even desirable because the available

beneﬁts are determined by the degree of risk it is con-

fronted. Risk is deﬁned as (PM Institute, 2008) “any

uncertain event or set of circumstances that, should

it occur, would have an effect on one or more objec-

tives”. Thus an uncertainty that does not effect the

objectives is not a risk, but it can even be an opportu-

nity. Risk management it is an important component

in deﬁning the relationship between risks, uncertainty

and objectives thus contributing to the chances of suc-

cess in the execution of a project.

On the other hand, creativity is based on exter-

nalization objects to create and store mental effort

records and form the basis for critique and negoti-

ation. A shared workspace that integrates different

tools to manage these artifacts is also required. We

consider that a ﬂexible content management solution

can satisfy these prerequisites.

Project management is about making complexity

manageable and it is important to collaboration be-

cause it provides teams an organized way of keeping

in touch with their goals. As deﬁned by The Project

Management Institute (PMI) (PM Institute, 2008),

project management is “the application of knowledge,

skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to

meet the project requirements”.

Project risk management provides approaches by

which uncertainty can be understood, assessed, and

managed within projects. One of the key prerequi-

sites of success in implementing risk management is

to have a proactive approach. This process must sup-

plement project management and must follow a holis-

tic approach. Risk management will not provide great

beneﬁts to the teams using it if their practices fall

under two limitations: focus on tactics and focus on

threats (Hilson, 2006).

Content management is the process of creating,

updating and publishing content on-line (Bartlang,

2010). Content management systems (CMS) repre-

sent solutions that manage the life cycle of content

and has to ensure that the integrity and meaning of the

content is not altered by the system. A ﬂexiblecontent

ABOUT CREATIVITY IN COLLABORATIVE SYSTEMS - Why it Matters and How it can be Supported

153

management component is an essential requirement

for a collaborative system. Such a component must

be focused on intelligent content (Rockley, 2011).

Our model of content management states that such

a system must include the followings:

• a mechanism to deﬁne the structure of the docu-

ment;

• a mechanism to create renderings for the content;

• access control;

• content workﬂow;

• a mechanism that would allow users to import

content from different sources;

• provide a packaging mechanism to group struc-

ture, renderings and workﬂows in a single object

so that they can be exchanged, reviewed and up-

dated;

• a mechanism to integrate web services that han-

dle content import from different formats and the

display of special content (e.g. protein structure).

We consider that a framework that implements the

aforementioned requirements using the XML stack

of technologies can serve as a ﬂexible externaliza-

tion mechanism in order to support creative insight

in collaboration and together with management tools

increase the teams changes in reaching their goals.

4 CONCLUSIONS

The rationality behind collaboration is creativity. Col-

laboration uses communication, coordination and co-

operation as a backbone but it is seen as something

more than that. It is about creating shared understand-

ing that no member could achieve on his own and in

order to generate insight, new ideas or new artifacts

it is a necessity to bring together different and often

controversial points of view.

Collaboration can be achieved if deﬁned in a goal

oriented framework and should use knowledge from

project and risk management to increase the chances

or obtaining the envisioned deliverables. These tools

can lead to successful achievement of objectives, but

they are not sufﬁcient.

Externalizations are of great importance because

they create a record of the mental process and repre-

sent artifacts that form the basis for critique and ne-

gotiation. Using a ﬂexible approach toward content

management externalization objects can be created.

In order to be able to focus on the creative aspect of

collaboration an emphasis on “intelligent content” has

to be placed.

Our next steps will represent ﬁnishing the imple-

mentation and do an analysis of its efﬁciency by using

it for some projects in our university and parter uni-

versities.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported by Romanian National Au-

thority for Scientiﬁc Research under the grant no.

PN2 92-100/2008 SICOMAP.

REFERENCES

Arias, E., Eden, H., Fischer, G., Gorman, A., and Scharff,

E. (2000). Transcending the individual human mind

- creating shared understanding through collabora-

tive design. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact.,

7(1):84–113.

Bartlang, U. (2010). Architecture and Methods for Flex-

ible Content Management in Peer-to-Peer Systems.

Vieweg+Teubner, Wiesbaden, Germany, 1st edition.

Camarinha-Matos, L. M. and Afsarmanesh, H. (2008). Col-

laborative Networks: Reference Modeling, chapter

Collaboration forms. Springer US.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997). Creativity: Flow and the Psy-

chology of Discovery and Invention. Harper Perennial.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2008). Flow: The Psychology of Op-

timal Experience. Harper Perennial Modern Classics,

New York.

Denise, L. (1999). Collaboration vs. C-Three (Cooperation,

Coordination, and Communication). Innovating, 7(3).

Farooq, U., Carroll, J. M., and Ganoe, C. H. (2005). Sup-

porting creativity in distributed scientiﬁc communi-

ties. In Proceedings of the 2005 international ACM

SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work,

GROUP ’05, pages 217–226, New York, NY, USA.

ACM.

Fuks, H., Raposo, A., Gerosa, M. A., Pimental, M., and

Lucena, C. J. P. (2008). The 3C Collaboration Model.

Hilson, D. (2006). Integrated risk management as a frame-

work for organisational success. In Proceedings of the

PMI Global Congress, Seattle WA, USA.

Osher, D. M. (2002). Creating Comprehensive and Collab-

orative Systems. Journal of Child & Family Studies,

11(1):91–99.

PM Institute (2008). A guide to the Project Management

Body of Knowledge. Project Management Institute,

Inc., Atlanta, USA, Fourth edition.

Rockley, A. (2011). What is Intelligent Content?

http://thecontentwrangler.com/2011/01/17/what-is-

intelligent-content/.

Schrage, M. (1990). Shared Minds: The New Technologies

of Collaboration. Random House.

Wolff, T. (2005). Collaborative Solutions - True Collabora-

tion as the Most Productive Form of Exchange. Col-

laborative Solutions Newsletter.

ICE-B 2011 - International Conference on e-Business

154