Promoting awareness in distributed mobile organizations: a cultural and technological challenge

Abstract

Increasing mutual awareness among distributed collaborators has been a focus of the CSCW community for over a decade. The majority of these studies, however, have been on availability and contextual awareness among coworkers in distributed but fixed contexts. This paper intends to contribute to our understanding of the awareness needs of distributed, mobile organizations by describing the inadvertent erosion of awareness in a 25-member division of one high-tech firm and the members' responses to proposed solutions. The findings suggest that managerial shifts may need to precede technology developments.