Developing Visual Collaborative Tools

Collaboration has been increasingly required to address the current challenges faced by organizations. With digitalization, these challenges are more and more complex but have common characteristics: they concern the organization as a whole, involve different and heterogeneous stakeholders, and evolve during the organization’s lifetime. Moreover, they are at the heart of a paradox: they are of paramount importance for companies, but they are very difficult to grasp. Although practitioners have developed very different definitions and perspectives, each challenge needs to be collectively addressed as the result of discussion and inquiry from different perspectives. These challenges are, for instance, developing innovative solutions to face rapidly changing environments, digitalizing processes, developing business ecosystems, defining projects or initiatives, fostering creativity, or designing and evaluating a new business model. Recently a “new” generation of tools has appeared. These tools are commonly called “canvas” as they were initially inspired by the Business Model Canvas. In fact, we designate this family of tools as visual inquiry tools or visual collaborative tools. These tools have common features that allow diverse stakeholders that face a joint problem to address the aforementioned challenges: • First, developing a shared language and understanding of the problem they are trying to solve. • Second, assisting diverse groups in exploring and/or brainstorming on a given problem thanks to their support for structuring and bounding the problem. • Third, supporting a less linear and more creative and innovative process mainly relying on design techniques as they allow a social design process, which has been proven useful to increase engagement within projects. Given the increasing amount and use of such visual inquiry tools, it seems crucial to accumulate knowledge on how to develop and evaluate them. Research is needed both into the design processes of such tools and/or their modelling, as well as their ontological and/or cognitive foundations. For the second year, this has been the main motivation to organize this mini-track at HICSS-53, as we believe that the IS discipline is well-suited to contribute to the design of such visual collaborative tools as it has a long tradition in design science research, modelling and UX