A qualitative descriptive analysis of collaboration technology in the navy

Abstract

Collaboration technologies enable people to communicate and use information to make organiza-tional decisions. The United States Navy refers to this concept as information dominance. Vari-ous collaboration technologies are used by the Navy to achieve this mission. This qualitative de-scriptive study objectively examined how a matrix oriented Navy activity perceived an imple-mented collaboration technology. These insights were used to determine whether a specific col-laboration technology achieved a mission of information dominance. The study used six collabo-ration themes as a foundation to include: (a) Cultural intelligence, (b) Communication, (c) Capa-bility, (d) Coordination, (e) Cooperation, and (f) Convergence. It was concluded that collabora-tion technology was mostly perceived well and helped to achieve some levels of information dominance. Collaboration technology improvement areas included bringing greater awareness to the collaboration technology, revamping the look and feel of the user interface, centrally paying for user and storage fees, incorporating more process management tools, strategically considering a Continuity of Operations, and incorporating additional industry best practices for data struc-tures. Emerging themes of collaboration were collected to examine common patterns identified in the collected data. Emerging themes included acceptance, awareness, search, scope, content, value, tools, system performance, implementation, training, support, usage, structure, complexity, approach, governance/configuration management/policy, and resourcing.