Collaboration in the World of ISD
By Steven Shaw

Collaboration is huge buzzword among business and IT literature. And for the most part, the hype surrounding the term is justified. Without a doubt, the workplace has transformed radically over the last two decades. Now, more than ever, workers are likely to find themselves carrying out their roles in the context of team-based projects, moving from one team to another.

In dynamic, globally competitive business environments, there is significant pressure to perform while working under challenging constraints. Not least, there are significant requirements for rapid learning on the job, and for effective and efficient practices for communicating new knowledge and information. Basically, this means that to succeed in business, there has to be more, and better, collaboration.

Collaboration is a way to design more and superior new products, bring new products to market more rapidly, sell products or service customers more effectively, innovate to reduce costs, or identify new business strategies or opportunities. Collaboration within and across teams, departments, the organization, and beyond the extended enterprise is the key to success and, indeed, viability.

Gaining momentum

Modern workplace trends, such as the increase in teleworking and the prevalence of virtual teams, whose members are often dispersed geographically and operating across separate time zones, magnify the challenges regarding collaboration. The solution to these challenges is to be found, in part, with the design and implementation of appropriate technology to support collaboration. A wide variety of tools and platforms are now available: groupware, workflow engines, computer conferencing systems, instant messaging, collaborative authoring tools, social computing tools (including social content tagging and peer-to-peer content sharing platforms), expertise locators, and portal frameworks, to name a few.

Many of these options are generic tools, even enterprise-level applications, which may be adapted to a variety of work environments. Some, like tabletop collaboration interfaces, are more suited to specific contexts, such as design work, for example. Beyond technology, however, we find the other piece of the solution, the part that lies with the cultivation of skills.

The new focus on team work and collaboration is reflected not only in the explosion of technologies to support collective work, but also in the identification of skills related to effective collaboration as important competencies in the workplace and as key objectives in educational curricula as well.

Many fields and disciplines have evolved best practices and shifted organizational culture to improve collaboration, while adopting and adapting enabling technology in one form or another. Consider, for example, the development of team-based approaches in medical care, and the practices of concurrent engineering that integrate design for production, design for assembly and design for maintenance. Ironically, however, the field of instructional systems development has lagged behind this trend.

Why “ironically”? For one, because learning and development services often are charged with the task of improving collaboration in other parts of the organization through, for example, related applications and skills training or as part of a change management initiative. But, more importantly, the work of instructional systems development is by its very nature inherently collaborative.

Typically, a variety of different specialists are involved: instructional designers, evaluation experts, subject matter experts, legal reviewers, graphic designers and media specialists, technical experts, courseware authors, business owners and representatives of end-user communities, and translators. To create an end product, these individuals interact through complex, often iterative, processes involving many artifacts. In global organizations, where content must meet the needs of multiple audiences, or be localized for different audiences, the imperative to collaborate is even greater.

This raises two questions. First, why has the field been slow in adopting technology to improve collaboration? Second, what form of technology would best meet the requirements of instructional systems development work, and how will it become more common in the field?

Adopting technology

The answer to the first question has several parts. To begin with, learning and development is nearly always a cost center in organizations. The motivation on the part of the organization to invest in tools and infrastructure to support the work of learning professionals is often lacking. Within the learning function, there is little incentive, and still less capacity, to innovate or exploit new opportunities (while assuming risks) when there is no source of investment, and when directors and managers must operate from fixed budgets that are fully committed just as soon as they are allocated.

Apart from the organizational issues, it is arguable that the education instructional designers receive very often does not provide the foundation for advanced collaborative practices. Traditional instructional systems design (ISD) models view design as a lock-step linear process, not a fundamentally collaborative, iterative process. The entrenched perspective is perhaps changing, but many professionals currently in the field have been trained under the old paradigm.

This linear view of ISD practice also is reflected in the first generation of commercial software that was developed to support instructional development. The best known of these is a tool that maps the activities of an individual designer, from needs analysis or front-end analysis through the development of objectives, tests and content. This is a stand-alone tool that organizes the work of an individual designer, rather than something that supports collaboration. It represents a form of electronic "workbench."

To support collaboration we need to move from the metaphor of “workbench” to that of “workspace.” Current best-of-breed learning content management systems offer support for collaborative ISD work. The platforms are adopted as a response to basic business drivers: for example, reduce cost of production and maintenance (largely through content re-use), reduce time to deployment, enable localization of content, and track content consumption at a granular level for regulatory purposes.

However, they include features and functionality to support collaboration. These capabilities are being exploited, increasingly, by learning content management system (LCMS) adopters. Thus, the way collaboration practices and tools are evolving in our field appears to represent a by-product of technology adoption in response to other, primary business needs. Here is a brief description of the features that support collaboration offered by the more powerful and elaborate LCMS, bundled under the concept of a workspace.

Workspaces are collaborative project environments that can be configured within an LCMS. A project manager in charge of a given workspace can define roles, create custom workflow, manage the distribution of various types of content to different roles and stakeholders based on permissions, and configure the system to generate notifications and reports related to task completion within a portal or portlet.

Content of various types (e.g., web content, MS Office documents) can be imported or created within the workspace, then viewed or edited and versioned from within the facility, either through the provision of plug-ins or via a standard like Webdav. Check-in/check-out controls are applied to ensure version integrity, and content can be tagged with metadata and stored under a taxonomy to facilitate retrieval. Instant messaging may be available to support real-time communications among project members and wikis may provide support for asynchronous collaboration.

IN addition, internal storyboard functionality may provide features to annotate storyboards with comments and notes to facilitate communications among team members. It may also be possible within the system to create notes that provide a permanent record of a project’s issues, decisions and progress. Sophisticated systems should provide overviews of multiple workspaces for project managers with more than one project. Finally, web-based platforms obviously offer the potential for anytime, anywhere access for participants.

Making it work

Contrast the capabilities and features enumerated above with the typical scenario in ISD work, where communications and collaboration are based on email distribution lists and phone conferences supplemented, sometimes, with tools like web meeting software or FTP sites. Alone, these tools are subject to human error. How easy is it to leave someone off a distribution list? How easy is it to mess up content during review and revision cycles with multiple actors involved and no true version control mechanism?

They also offer little in the way of a reliable record of project stages that might be accessed later—for example, if a project audit is required. And, there is ample scope for inefficiencies to creep in. Without automated workflow and task notifications, work might sit unnoticed in someone’s “in” basket, lost within a mountain of email.

Put simply, the capabilities built into learning content management systems (LCMSs) are beginning to drive more advanced collaboration practices within the field of ISD. Of course, it is not necessary that learning and development services acquire an LCMS to adopt better, more powerful technology to facilitate collaboration.

Some training or educational services that involve complex publishing models have long established practices that include, at least, sophisticated version control and workflow. However, for most organizations, the availability of the required tools likely will only come when LCMS are implemented, as part of the package.

The fact that the tools are integrated into the training department’s production platform also means that they are largely under the control of the department rather than directly under IT and, therefore, can be configured to meet the specific needs of the department. It also means that the tools have a greater chance of being closely integrated with production processes and accessible from one point of entry or portal.

These circumstances will likely facilitate and increase adoption. However, we should not lose site of the fact that adopting new technology to shape collaborative processes and behaviors entails very significant change, and therefore requires change management. In most cases, LCMS adopters implement basic production processes to start with and then introduce further innovations such as the use of workspaces a little later. Too much change at one time cannot be digested.

This phased approach also gives the organization time to think what human and organizational barriers to adopting tools for better collaboration present themselves, and consider what strategies must be brought to bear to overcome them. In many ways, getting individuals to collaborate more effectively may be more challenging than persuading them to use, say, a new production tool. As cautioned at the outset, at issue is the presence of the appropriate competencies—skills, knowledge, and attitudes. These are at least as determinative of success as the availability of good technology.

Collaboration is certainly an imperative. Creating better content, aligning content with business needs, localizing content, creating content more efficiently—all these goals and more are attainable only through increasing the frequency and effectiveness of collaboration. Apart from the technology, and the presence of the appropriate communications and analytical skills, such improvements also require that we understand better the work of ISD so that we can design and institutionalize the most effective collaborative practices. Research and understanding in this area seems, also, to be in its infancy, in comparison with other design-oriented fields.