A Technology for Pattern-Based Process Design and its Application to Collaboration Engineering - Collaborative Technologies and Applications for Interactive Information Design - page 3

become the basis for most approaches to support
change, improvement, and innovation in organiza-
tions. Collaboration engineering is an emerging
approach to designing collaborative work practices
for high value recurring tasks and deploying them
to practitioners to execute for themselves without
ongoing support from professional facilitators.
Collaboration engineering researchers have
distilled a number of collaboration principles,
techniques and best practices, and codified them
into a design pattern language (Briggs et al.,
2006; Briggs, Vreede, & Nunamaker, 2003). This
design pattern language provides Collaboration
Engineers with reusable elements for designing
collaborative work practices, and for specifying
the technological capabilities a group will need
to support its efforts. While such repositories of
best practices support the design of collabora-
tive work practices, this paper proposes a design
for a technology to further support the design
of collaborative work practices using a pattern
language.
While new technologies can be a driver for
changes of work practices, they often do not
prescribe a new way of working, but rather of-
fer the tools to support the new way. Workflow
management (Aalst, Hofstede, & Kiepuszewski,
2003) approaches and business process engineer-
ing (Grover & Kettinger, 1995) methods offer
an overview of tasks and processes, but do not
provide the detailed 'how to' instructions to initi-
ate and prescribe change. To change a collabora-
tive work practice, groups need to be trained or
require facilitation support (Briggs, 2006). The
transition of new collaborative work practices is a
complex task because a new work practice needs
to be accepted and adopted by its users. A key
requirement is the users' willingness to change.
Briggs describes a Value Frequency Model to
explain the behavioral intention (willingness) to
change a work practice (Briggs, 2006). In this
model, the willingness to change is caused by an
individual judgment of the value of change and
the expected frequency in which this added value

is experienced. Therefore, in order to transfer a
new collaborative work practice, it needs to be
designed in a way that offers its users a recurring
added value.
The design of a new collaboration process
poses several, sometimes conflicting, require-
ments: It needs to improve productivity of the
organization, it needs to offer recurring value to
the users, resources for the process are limited by
definition, and the skills of process leaders might
also present a limitation (Kolfschoten, Vreede,
Briggs, & Sol, 2007). While many design ap-
proaches to collaboration support exist (Schwarz,
1994; Sheffield, 2004; Zigurs & Buckland, 1998),
they merely offer a high level process structure,
not the details on choices in tool configuration,
combined with specific instructions. Research
shows that such small configuration can have large
impact on outcomes in group processes (Santanen
& Vreede, 2004; Shepherd, Briggs, Reinig, Yen, &
Nunamaker, 1996). To design new collaboration
processes such that these requirements are met
with some certainty, the designer can use best
practices or design patterns - solutions that work
and that can be combined to offer the prescription
of an instrumental, predictable and transferable
collaborative work practice (Coplien & Harrison,
2005; Schümmer & Lukosch, 2007). Design pat-
terns are re-usable solutions to address frequently
occurring problems. In Alexander's words: “A
pattern describes a problem which occurs over
and over again and then describes the core of the
solution to that problem, in such a way that you
can use this solution a million times over, without
ever doing it the same way twice (Alexander,
Ishikawa, Silverstein et al., 1977, p. x).”
A pattern language offers a designer or com-
munity of designers a library of best practices for
a specific domain and product that can be used
and combined to create solutions to problems
in the organization. Furthermore it can support
this community in providing a shared language,
a coherent basis for their design and a way to
document and transfer knowledge in this domain