A Socio-Technical Perspective in Support of Information Sharing for Diverse Teams in Today's Workplace

Abstract

Work today is accomplished by people in teams that are increasingly distributed, collaborative, and heterogeneous. One or more dimensions of team heterogeneity can be experienced by collaborators as distance. Geography, time zone, discipline, and organizational factors such as role and project tenure are of particular interest. This diversity, when experienced as distance, provides challenges to the social fabric of teams, and calls for additional technological development to provide information sharing tools that are capable of recognizing and addressing these gaps without adding additional burden on the individual or team. We discuss the distances, information sharing challenges, and strategies to place the human at the center, with a focus on tool and technology simplification, personalization and consolidation.