Publish at February 04 2019 Updated February 01 2024
Bernard Lombardo-Fiault's thesis, "Digital collaboration and new forms of professional visibility", shows that a new form of visibility induced by sharing, which underpins digital collaboration, can be a brake or a lever on the adoption of digital collaboration, and that it needs to be objectified in the process of setting up a social platform.
The thesis provides a deeper understanding of the collaborative paradigm, proposing a typology of uses based on their intrinsic and social value, an adoption methodology geared towards the local transformation of everyday professional practices, and an indicator of the "value" of collaborative behavior, which takes the form of an index determined according to algorithmic modalities.
Firstly, 50% of an employee's productivity today depends on his or her digital work environment. Secondly, digital collaborative and social practices are a potential source of productivity gains of 20 to 25%, particularly for weekly activities such as reading and replying to e-mails, searching for and gathering information, communication and internal cooperation.
Studies show that the deployment of collaborative practices could eliminate this unproductive time and increase agent productivity. It would be a matter of building a new "self-efficacy" in Garfinkel's sense (Garfinkel, 2007) in the field of professional cooperation practices, considering the new "foundation of habits" as a direct determinant of adoption behavior imbued with visible, shared activities.
This thesis endeavors to measure the relevance of a collaborative index that figures the digital collaborative behavior of an individual in his or her production relationship with the organization that employs him or her. It functions as a monitoring service in the healthcare field, giving service users reflexive feedback on the evolution of their practices.
In so doing, the collaborative index reinforces the visibility of everyone's actions. Visibility" is defined in the thesis as manifest exposure to the sight and understanding of others. Visibility is at the heart of the blurring of personal and professional spheres. At the same time, the Internet fosters the expression of narcissistic behavior, combined with a desire to define the boundaries of one's "private life"; for each individual, it's a question of arbitrating "between privacy and security, or between privacy and service efficiency.
The intersection between visibility and cooperation/collaboration arises, since the aim is to make the collaborative effort visible. This is why part of the theoretical framework is devoted to distinguishing between cooperative and collaborative forms, whether individual contributions to work are juxtaposed, or work is merged into a collective achievement. The author of the thesis points out that "cooperation" appears as a generic term covering three different levels of "relationship to the other": cooperation, collaboration and co-decision. Cooperation occurs when individual actions contribute to the actions of others, and vice versa. Collaboration is the act of working together in the execution of a certain action, generating common understanding and shared knowledge. The result is thus attributable to the group as a whole. Co-decision concerns group decisions or decisions inspired by the group, with the players either undifferentiated or endowed with special status".
Collaborative work is also carried out by means of groupware, whose main functionalities are: individual interaction, coupling, make-unmake, find differences in independent versions of an object, combine independent versions of a single object, access control, competition control, workflow management, awareness of others, session management. In addition, several roles can be combined to activate all these functionalities: editor, publisher, consultant and editor. The idea of collaborative work made visible is that of work aloud, which will benefit from the voluntary contributions of listeners. Visibility is the condition for sharing, but it also means exposure, taking the risk of absolute transparency (cf. Big Brother or Bentham and Foucault's panopticon).
To identify the conditions of professional visibility that foster collaboration, the research is divided into 4 areas: epistemological (comprehensive quantitative and qualitative approach), theoretical (panoptic theory, institutional analysis, socio-organizational and cybernetic approach, ethnomethodology), technical (exploratory and prospective interviews, training groups, follow-up workshops, round-table discussions, survey polls and calculation of the collaborative index) and morphological (plasticity of hypotheses, social transaction).
The author identifies 12 key variables to be tested in the proposed collaborative index model.
The research was carried out in a two-part field: a public institution and a works council, illustrating both a panopticist and a managerial approach.
The results show that imposed visibility puts off employees, who come up against the principle of adoption, i.e. acceptance of the paradigm and its rules, over and above appropriation of the tools. Digital collaboration is part of a more agile, less structured approach to information production than the information systems of the previous generation; it articulates concepts such as trust, collective intelligence and wirearchy; this approach shifts the issue of visibility induced by collaborative practices to the field of social cognition, and calls for the definition of a model, a "theory of digital collaboration", a specific paradigm that takes charge of the activities and issues linked to new visibilities, and plays a mediating role that encourages the adoption of new practices. It then becomes possible to "quantify" visible practices, and analyze the new phenomenon of "calculated" visibility.
From an operational point of view, the method tested guaranteed a transformation rate of over 80% for groups of 25 to 100 people, and over 60% for groups of more than 100 people. It also enabled us to measure the progress made in adopting collaborative practices at all stages of the project, both in terms of mastery of tools and understanding and acceptance of rules and practices, as well as individual and collective gains in efficiency, measured in terms of FTE (full-time equivalent).
Read the thesis
"Digital collaboration and new forms of professional visibility -
Proposing a methodology and a reflexive device" - Bernard Lombardo-Fiault
https://www.theses.fr/2017PA080097.pdf
Wirearchy https://www.duperrin.com/2008/05/05/hierarchie-vs-connectarchie/
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