Lessons learnt in the use of a collaborative design environment

The paper discusses collaboration problems in large organizations where systems development takes place in distributed projects. We describe an in-house collaborative design environment, which has been used in several units in the NOKIA corporation. This environment called Timbuktu is evaluated based on our understanding after several years´ consultation and interviews of knowledge sharing in distributed projects. We use two theories to introduce and analyze the subject: collaboration support as a social action theory, and theory of knowledge creation. Both of these theories are discussed in the context of collaborative design environments. The lessons learnt are aimed to guide developing collaboration environments for the future.