Engineering productivity and collaboration systems-a review of six years research at the international concurrent enterprising (ICE) conference

Collaboration Systems this year is for the first time a track of its own at the ICE conference. This paper reviews the relevance of the topic for ICE, which generally advances knowledge on the collaboration of engineers across functional boundaries inside the organization or across organizations. The paper reviews the achieved research results in this domain, which are reported in 73 papers at the ICE conference since 1999 and that cover three main topics tools & technology, methods, and working or organising principles. The review shows that collaboration systems research advanced in the community first, as moving from modular technology to encompassing systems, second as moving from predominantly describing tools to the main focus on the methods and the processes that they support. The third and most recent trend is to understanding the rational for collaboration systems as increasing engineering productivity. The track title collaboration systems points to the available body of system knowledge of the interrelationship of technologies and tools, methods and processes, and principles and rationale. This year´s papers are in line with the trend. The ICE community has experience in systems research methodologies and a track record in developing collaboration gaming and simulation systems, which can be a valuable contribution to emerging systems research approaches like “living laboratories”. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research directions.