Assessing the maturity levei of an organization in its adoption of collaboration technologies

Nowadays there are many information technologies that can make a significant difference to support collaborative efforts in the workspace. The role of IT is to support group collaboration by empowering team members with the right capabilities. One way to assess capabilities is through a maturity model. This paper proposes a first version of the Collaboration-Technology Maturity model (CTMM), aiming to serve as a strategic instrument for IT managers to control and manage the adoption of Collaboration Technologies (CITs) among their organizations. Our contribution is both theoretical and practical as we propose a descriptive maturity model. Nevertheless, it is also an application method and assessment instruments. We also completed an empirical evaluation by conducting 89 assessments at Latin American companies of all sizes and industries. This extensive field exercise allowed us to not only evaluate the usefulness of the model and instruments but also investigate CIT adoption patterns in Latin America in an attempt to collect historical data to further evolve CTMM into a comparative model. Responses were used to provide conclusions on CIT adoption in Latin America with respect to three specific backgrounds: the country of origin (region), size (in number of employees) and industry type. The implications of our findings are discussed for practitioners and researchers.

A sociometric analysis for the creation of an integrated multicultural work team

This research aimed to apply the sociometric theory and its methodology to create an integrated multicultural work team. The study focused on the application of the sociometry theory, developed by Jacob L. Moreno in 1934, to analyze the small multicultural group. In the beginning, a review of the literature was done to have a better understanding of Sociometric Theory as well as the modern tools and software developed to analyze and map the social networks. After this part of the study, the qualitative study was done, in which 26 students from 12 countries, which studied together in a Corporate International Master (2014-2015), developed by Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, Corporate Master of Business Administration from ESADE Business School and FGV/EBAPE, were surveyed and asked them to choose people, among the selected group, who they attracted, rejected or they were neutral towards, in 4 different scenarios: work team, leadership, trip (leisure time) and personal problem. Additionally, there were, two questions asked about how they felt when they answered the survey and which question(s) was/were difficult to answer and why. The focus on these two questions was to understand the emotional state of the respondents when they answered the survey and related this emotional state to the Sociometric Theory. The sociometric matrix, using Microsoft Excel, was created using the answers and the total of the positive, negative and neutral choices were analyzed for each scenario as well as the mutualities and incongruences of the choices. Furthermore, the software Kumu was used to analyze the connections between the people in the selected group using three metrics: size, degree centrality and indegree. Also Kumu was used to draw the social maps or sociometric maps. Using the relationship level analyses of the sociometric matrix and maps, it was possible to create an integrated multicultural work team. In the end, the results obtained suggest that it is possible to apply the sociometric methodology to study the relationships inside companies, project teams and work teams and identify the best work team based on the interrelationship between the people as well as the lack of communication among the team members, project team or inside the company as a whole.