Working Together Apart

Increasingly, teams are working together when they are not in the same location, even though there are many challenges to doing so successfully. Here we review the latest insights into these matters, guided by a framework that we have developed during two decades of research on this topic. This framework organizes a series of factors that we have found to differentiate between successful and unsuccessful distributed collaborations. We then review the kinds of technology options that are available today, focusing more on types of technologies rather than specific instances. We describe a database of geographically distributed projects we have studied and introduce the Collaboration Success Wizard, an online tool for assessing past, present, or planned distributed collaborations. We close with a set of recommendations for individuals, managers, and those higher in the organizations who wish to support distance work.

Judith Olson is the Bren Professor of Information and Computer Sciences in the Informatics Department at the UC Irvine, with courtesy appointments in the School of Social Ecology and the Merage School of Business. She has researched teams whose members are not collocated for over 20 years, summaries of which are found in her most cited paper, “Distance Matters,” (Olson & Olson, 2000), and in her key theoretical contribution in the book Scientific Collaboration on the Internet (Olson, Zimerman, and Bos, Eds., 2008). Her current work focuses on ways to verify the theory’s components while at the same time helping new scientific collaborations succeed. She has studied distributed teams both in the field and in the laboratory, the latter focusing on the communication hurdles distributed teams have and the consequent underutilization of remote team members skills and the reduction in trust. She is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and with her husband and colleague, Gary Olson, holds the Lifetime Achievement award from the Special Interest Group in Computer Human Interaction.Gary Olson is a professor at the University of California at Irvine, in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences. He is also a Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan. His research spans the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, with particular interests in collaborative technologies and their role in supporting long-distance work. His research interests include cognition, problem-solving, reasoning, and communication in social and physical settings. Olson is a member of the Association of Computing Machinery, the Association for Psychological Science, and the American Psychological Association. He is currently a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Organizational Computing, Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Cooperative Work: An International Journal, the Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration, and Foundations and Trends in Human-Computer Interaction. Olson is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery, the Association for Psychological Science, and the American Psychological Association. In 2003, he was elected to the CHI Academy. In 2006, he received the CHI Lifetime Achievement Award along with his wife, Dr. Judith S. Olson.