By identifying the socio-technical conditions required for teams to work effectively remotely, the Distance Matters framework has been influential in CSCW since its introduction in 2000. Advances in collaboration technology and practices have since brought teams increasingly closer to achieving these conditions. This paper presents a ten-month ethnography in a remote organization, where we observed that despite exhibiting excellent remote collaboration, teams paradoxically struggled to collaborate across team boundaries. We extend the Distance Matters framework to account for inter-team collaboration, arguing that challenges analogous to those in the original intra-team framework -- common ground, collaboration readiness, collaboration technology readiness, and coupling of work -- persist but are actualized differently at the inter-team scale. Finally, we identify a fundamental tension between the intra- and inter-team layers: the collaboration technology and practices that help individual teams thrive (e.g., adopting customized collaboration software) can also prompt collaboration challenges in the inter-team layer, and conversely the technology and practices that facilitate inter-team collaboration (e.g., strong centralized IT organizations) can harm practices at the intra-team layer. The addition of the inter-team layer to the Distance Matters framework opens new opportunities for CSCW, where balancing the tension between team and organizational collaboration needs will be a critical technological, operational, and organizational challenge for remote work in the coming decades.
翻译:远程问题框架自2000年引入以来,通过确定各团队有效远程工作所需的社会技术条件,在该委员会中产生了影响力。自2000年引入以来,协作技术和做法方面的进展使各团队越来越接近于实现这些条件。本文件介绍了一个偏远组织为期10个月的民族学,我们注意到,尽管存在出色的远程协作,但各团队自相矛盾地努力跨越团队边界进行协作。我们扩大了远程问题框架,以顾及团队间协作,认为与最初的团队内协作框架(共同点、协作准备状态、协作技术准备状态、协作准备状态和工作结合)类似的挑战持续存在,但在团队间规模上却不同。最后,我们查明了团队内和团队间层面之间的根本紧张关系:帮助各团队繁荣起来的合作技术和做法(例如采用定制的合作软件)也可以迅速应对团队间协作的挑战。相反,促进团队内部协作的技术和做法(例如,强有力的中央化信息技术组织)可能会损害团队内部层面的做法。此外,在团队内部和团队间协作过程中,将出现一种组织间紧张关系和跨层之间的新机遇。