paper: distance matters

Distance Matters
Olson and Olson
Human-Computer Interaction, 2000

This paper examines and refutes the myth that remote cooperative technology will remove distance as a major factor effecting collaboration. While technologies such as videoconferencing and networking allow us to more effectively communicate and collaborate across great distances, the author's argue that distance will remain an important factor for the forseeable future, regardless of how sophisticated the technology becomes.

This paper reviews results of studies concerning both collocated and distant collaborative work, and extracts four concepts through which to understand collaborative processes and the adoption of remote technologies: common ground, coupling, collaboration readiness, and technology readiness. The case is then made that because of these issues and their interactions, distance will continue to have a strong effect on collaborative work processes.

• Collocated Work Today
  • Put people in a collaborative workspace (e.g. large conference room)
  • Showed a doubling in productivity metrics
    • Important to note: work was at a stage appropriate for intense effort
  • Spatiality of human interaction
    • People and objects exist in space, roles can be indexed by location
  • Not explicitly mentioned: the interactive space must be of the right size to support the collaborative work. Otherwise would experience “thrashing”
  • Key characteristics of collocated synchronous interactions
    • Rapid feedback
    • Multiple channels
    • Personal information
    • Nuanced information
    • Shared local context
    • Informal “hall” time before and after
    • Coreference
    • Individual control
    • Implicit cues
    • Spatiality of reference
• Remote Work Today
  • Successes
    • Collaboratory of Space Physicists
      • Simultaneous access to real-time data from throughout the world
      • User-centered design – 10 major redesigns over 7-year period
    • NetMeeting at Boeing
      • Moderator capable of debugging technology and eliciting interaction from remote participants
    • Telecom software maintenance and enhancement
      • Supported by email, a/v conferencing, transferred files, fax
    • Contributors to success
      • Known structure, boundaries
        • Who owns what, who can change what, what causes problems
      • Detailed process shared across sites
        • Common language about work
      • These takes about 2 years for novice to learn
  • Failures
  • Process of work changes, requiring more clarification and management overhead
  • Remote work is reorganized to fit the location and technology constraints
    • Partition work into regional units
    • Many affordances of collocation are lost
  • Technological barriers
    • Set-up time, working the camera (missing speaker from picture), not heard (bad microphone setup)
  • Leads to new behaviors
    • Always identifying oneself
    • More formal turn-taking
    • Discourse rules
    • => Increased effort of communication
  • For tasks involving unambiguous tasks and people with much in common, video (vs audio) has been shown to not effect the outcome performance of people, but often changes the process
  • For more ambiguous tasks, video has been correlated with significant improvements in performance
    • Gesture and viewing the speaker increased comprehension
    • More channels for communication / disambiguation
  • Users unaware of difficulty encountered with communication channel
    • Often change behavior rather than fix the technology
      • E.g. shouting due to bad volume on videophone
  • Proxemics (apparent distance)
    • Zoomed-out image of person less effective for conversation
  • Motivation
    • Individuals not compensated according to their competitive talents
    • Sharing of data and ideas improved by compensation and attribution
    • Example of using groupware to be seen using groupware by managers – that was the real motivation for adoption
  • Caveat: interesting behaviors can emerge when tools are used for long time (Dourish et al paper, 1996)
• Findings Integrated: Four Concepts
  • Common Ground
    • Knowledge that the participants have in common, and they are aware they have in common
    • Established from both general knowledge about a person’s background and through specific knowledge gleaned from the person’s appearance and behavior during conversation
    • Cues provided by media (Clark and Brennan 1991)
      • Copresence
      • Visibility
      • Audibility
      • Contemporality
      • Simultaneity
      • Sequentiality
      • Reviewability
      • Revisability
    • Prescription: focus on the importance of common ground. If not yet established, help develop it. Video is a great improvement over audio.
  • Coupling in Work: A Characteristic of Work Itself (<- untrue assertion?)
• The extent and kind of communication required by the work
• Tightly coupled: depends strongly on talents of collections of workers and is nonroutine, even ambiguous
• Loosely coupled: has fewer dependencies OR is more routine
• Coupling is associated with the nature of the task, with some interaction with the common ground of the participants
• => Tightly coupled work is very difficult to do remotely
• Prescription: design work organization so that tightly coupled work is collocated. The more formal the procedures, the more likely the success.
• Collaboration Readiness
  • Using shared technology assumes that coworkers need to share information and are rewarded for it.
  • Prescription: one should not attempt to introduce groupware if there is no culture of sharing and collaboration. If needed, one has to align the incentive structure with the desired behavior.
• Technology Readiness
  • Organizations (infrastructure, expertise) and individuals (know-how, habits) must be ready to use the technology.
  • Prescription: advanced technologies should be introduced in small steps.
• Distance Work in the New Millennium
• Though useful technologies will emerge and improve, there will always be a gap between remote and collocated collaboration.
• Common Ground, Context, and Trust
  • Local events, holidays, weather, and social interchange
  • Common ground as pre-cursor to trust
  • Suggests collocated team-building trips, followed by the remote work
• Different Time Zones
  • Differing work hours, circadian rhythms
• Culture
  • Local conventions (e.g. silicon valley casual attire vs. the suits)
  • Difference in process
    • Task orientedness (e.g. tasks (American) vs. relationships (So. European)
    • Power distance – acceptance and/or questioning of authority
    • Management style
      • “Hamburger” style
        • Sweet-talk – top bun
        • Criticism – the meat
        • Encouragement – the bottom bun
      • American : hamburger, German : just meat, Japanese : just buns (“one has to smell the meat”)
    • Turn-taking (add pauses in conversation to open it up)
• Interactions among these Factors and with Technology
• Time-Zone vs. culture
  • Multi-time-zone compatibility vs. holidays and accepted hours of work
• Culture vs. culture
  • cost vs. maintaining relations over video conferencing
• Conclusion
• Despite the limitations, distance technologies will continue to be useful and work their ways into social and organizational life, in some cases affecting profound changes in social and organizational behavior. However, through all this, distance will continue to matter.