ABSTRACT
Collaboration has always been a cornerstone of success in organizations, and yet the importance of collaboration is dramatically increasing in our knowledge economy. With the development of the Internet and especially Web 2.0, a vastly growing amount of tools and technologies to support collaboration are emerging. This chapter will look back at three decades of group support systems (GSS) research, and will elicit patterns and lessons learned on important issues such as the types of problems that are solved with collaboration support technology, the characteristics and attributes of collaboration technology that create value, and the way in which collaboration technologies can be successfully employed in organizations. We discovered two parallel trends in collaboration support technology: the development of very generic multipurpose collaboration tools on one hand, and the development and use of very specific collaboration support tools that are tailored to a specific process or task. Furthermore, we sketch the efforts to support or even eliminate the facilitator, while at the same time we recognize that some facilitation skills will remain in demand, especially for tasks with high social or stakeholder complexity.
