Can collaborative systems "think"? Insights gleaned from looking at collaborative systems as cognitive systems

Collaborative systems are both technical and social. As a field, or rather a set of interacting disciplines, we have made great strides in almost all aspects of technological support for collaboration. Better connectivity makes narrowing the distance between people almost effortless - whether they are two buildings over, across the world, or in the same place at a different time. What remains a major question is how well it all works. Not just the technology, or just the social aspects, but the combination of the two. How does a collaborative system translate to the people and the tasks they do, and how the technology brings them together? In this talk we look at human-technical systems as essentially distributed cognitive systems. That viewpoint provides useful insights into how such socio-technical systems are (or are not) working and how changes in process, technology and procedure have impact. Illustrations and examples are drawn from a decade of research in domains as varied as Air Traffic Control, online work groups, technical help desks and parallel programming. In the end we take a step back to look at how trends in past collaborative systems can be (re)applied to current ones.