Abstract:

The collaboration between as well as within enterprises has developed a lot during the past years. As a consequence of continuous digitalization and driven by pandemic circumstances organizations had to change their way of intra-organizational online collaboration (IOC). A review of subject related theoretical research shows several approaches to support enterprises developing their IOC approach. This paper aims to reach practical validation by pointing out current challenges in practice, identifying widespread practices and comparing them with best practice approaches through the implementation in a laboratory environment. It therefore describes the development of Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) for higher education studies.

To get a wider view and a non-biased idea of state-of-the-art IOC the authors use the approach of an unsystematic literature research based on scientific literature and company owned blogs. This paper offers insights on current applied practices as well as occurring challenges regarding IOC in enterprises belonging to the target group of small and medium enterprises. Using existing research about capability areas of efficient IOC to cluster best-practice criteria the paper leads to the development of a CVE focusing on implementing an efficient IOC infrastructure into an organization belonging to the target group.

To evaluate this model, experts for higher educational e-learning as well as collaboration experts in digital-leading positions from small and medium-sized German enterprises were interviewed.

The results of this paper are twofold. On one side it provides insights on how IOC is currently practiced in German small and medium-sized enterprises and which challenges have to be coped with. On the other side the paper illustrates the practical implementation of the several capability areas within a CVE, where higher education students apply best practice approaches.

Key parts of this study are on one side an overview of current practices and challenges of IOC in German small and medium-sized enterprises and on the other side the development of a higher education CVE for applying best practice approaches of IOC.

Further research to this study should be the conduction of the developed CVE in higher education environments.

Keywords:

Intra-organizational online collaboration, collaboration, virtual, virtual collaborative learning, VCL, collaborative virtual environment, CVE, best practice.