Electronic Meetings - CSCW and GDSS

Factors contributing to the failure of groupware systems

Groupware systems fail when

• people who do extra work for the system are not the beneficiary
  

  Examples
  

  • the automatic meeting scheduling feature of the electronic
    calendar :
    

    The immedidate beneficiary is the manager or secretary who
    initiates a meeting. Additional work is done by group members
    who would not otherwise maintain the electronic calendar.
    

  • the project management application :
    

    The primary beneficiary is the project leader or manager.
    Other members in the project have to enter considerable
    information about their tasks and completion time for the
    project.
    

  The inequality of work and benefit discourages group members from
  using the system. Low use of the system will lead to the replacement
  or withdrawn of the groupware.
  

• social conventions is not considered

  group decision support system :
  The explicit record of opposing positions may be politically
  unacceptable to a manager who wants to project a strong
  impression of consensus in the group.
  

  It is difficult to make such implicit knowledge available to the
  computer. Moreover, people tend to keep this implicit knowledge
  to themselves.
  

• design is built around specific work procedures that do not
  allow exception handling
  

  Ad hoc arrangements that are for the best interest of the group
  may not be compatible with the discipline imposed by the system.
  Unless the system is backed by the upper level management. The
  system will be withdrawn because it is not compatible with the
  group operation.