Multi-organizational multi-stakeholder collaboration systems: An exploratory research study of design concerns in healthcare

Abstract

Much Collaboration Engineering research focuses on collaboration systems for teams of five to fifty members. That research can also inform large-scale multi-organizational multi-stakeholder (MO-MS) collaborations such as disaster relief, joint ventures, and healthcare. These larger contexts, though, present design concerns beyond those for smaller teams, and not all these concerns are self-evident. This paper explores the design concerns for IT-supported MO-MS collaboration. We selected the healthcare industry as the first exemplar domain for this inquiry mainly because research shows high potential benefits from, and substantial challenges to implementing systems for collaborative healthcare. We draw on an extensive literature review, and 50 semi-structured interviews with experts to discover and validate collaboration challenges presented by in-house and cloud-based IT services for healthcare. We derive an eleven-class typology of design concerns related to MO-MS collaboration, and derive requirements-elicitation design questions for each class. To demonstrate its utility, we draw on exploratory findings to elaborate the generalizable typology with design probes specific to healthcare collaboration systems.