Opportunities for proactive support of reuse and organizational learning in ad hoc collaborative work activity: A field study of proposal writing

Abstract

Creating good proposals is critical to the success of many organizations. In spite of this, proposal generation is typically ad hoc, often inefficient and relies heavily on wisdom, skills and resources that participants accumulate informally over time. We studied the tactics that informants believed were helpful and how past content and successful procedures can be reused to increase the efficiency of collaborative proposal writing projects. However, there seem to be few tools in use that help organizations capture these beneficial regularities. Currently, most proposal writers only have a partial picture of them and, even when they are aware of them, often cannot exploit them, resulting in perpetual improvisation, resource scavenging and oversights. We identify opportunities to address such problems by supporting reuse of content and procedures and enhancing organizational learning.