Information & Management 40 (2003) 159–164

Your time and my time: a temporal approach to groupware calendar systems Heejin Lee* Department of Information Systems and Computing, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH, UK Received 29 November 2000; received in revised form 11 July 2001; accepted 22 November 2001

Abstract Groupware calendar systems (GCS)—on-line, networked calendar software—are increasingly being used in large organizations. This paper presents a study of the use of GCS in organizations. It reviews major issues in the area, showing that current efforts lack attention to the temporal aspect, which seems to be at the center of a GCS. Sociotemporal order is a foundation of social organization, and as such it is embedded in the use of GCS. The paper reports on a survey of GCS use in a business organization to show the relevancy of the temporal approach. It concludes by showing the increasing importance of GCS in particular and calendar technologies in general in new patterns of working (virtual, mobile, and flexible) in emerging forms of organizations. # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Groupware calendar systems; Social time; Clock time; Time management; Calendar technologies; Groupware

1. Introduction Groupware calendar systems (GCS) are systems of on-line calendars that can be shared across a network. They provide simultaneous access to time-structured information [10]. While individual users retain personal calendars, action item lists, contact lists, etc. coordination between groups of employees is supported by group calendars, meeting reminders, and especially by scheduling functions that aid in searching the calendars of multiple users to find convenient times for meetings and to schedule resources, such as meeting rooms. Integration with e-mail can facilitate the invitation process. Individual users sometimes keep their own calendar on-line and allow various degrees of access to them by * Tel.: þ44-1895-274000x2313; fax: þ44-1895-251686. E-mail address: [email protected] (H. Lee).

other users. Meeting arrangements can then be made by simple sharing or viewing other people’s calendars or by sending meeting invitations through e-mail. Thus, there are three different types of calendar systems of interest here. 1. Purely manual, generally, paper diaries. 2. Automated single user (unshared) calendars that simulate much of the operations of a paper diary system. 3. GCS that link the automated calendars with various degrees of file sharing in the organization. GCS have been available since the late 1970s [20]. There are many groupware products in the market; these include group calendar systems as a basic facility (Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook, etc.). However, despite their long presence in offices, their use by people in organizations has been limited. Scheduling features are seldom used in commercial products

0378-7206/02/$ – see front matter # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 3 7 8 - 7 2 0 6 ( 0 1 ) 0 0 1 4 0 - 9

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due to the lack of a ‘critical mass’ of use. People may find paper calendars, telephones and, at best, simple e-mails more convenient [8,22]. Recently, however, high use of GCS is reported in two large IT companies [21] and GCS use is increasing among large organizations. Furthermore, as the Internet and web-technologies advanced, a number of web-based calendaring solutions have appeared. Many web-sites offer solutions for access to an on-line database of calendars (e.g. http://calendar.yahoo.com, http://calenar.aol.com). They allow users to keep track of their appointments and provide them with the means to grant other users access to theirs. Depending on the level of access permitted, other users are able to view the calendar, add entries (i.e. book appointments), and even alter existing entries. The significant advantage of web-based calendars is the freedom they offer, given the fact that most desktop calendaring applications are restricted to a certain organization. However, the effectiveness of web-based systems has yet to be proved. It is also possible to add personal data assistants (PDA) to calendar technologies. With enhanced replication capacity, a PDA gives users the extra features available in paper diaries; among others, mobility is lacking in networked and web-based calendars. While calendar applications are commonly seen nowadays and their use is increasing, research on this topic is still limited. Among calendar technologies, this paper focuses on GCS. It reports on a study that investigated their use in organizations.

2. Main issues in GCS Despite the widespread presence of GCS, research on GCS has tended to consider it as a part of CSCW [12]. Only recently have separate studies appeared. A literature review reveals four main issues. 2.1. Disparity in work and benefit There is a disparity between those who do the work and those who get the benefit from CSCW applications [7]. For personal applications, it is easy for users to perceive benefits in adopting calendar systems; they make users’ working practices easier and save time. However, with GCS applications, the user must often

do the work of inputting temporal details of, say, meetings while the benefit is primarily enjoyed by others who request meetings, such as managers. GCS demand work of employees who do not wish to maintain an on-line calendar. 2.2. Discretion or mandate It is often claimed that the success of groupware relies upon a mandate by the adopting organization [17,19]. However, this is difficult to enforce. When forced, users can simply enter information, even incorrect material, into their calendar to appear to comply. It is also impossible to remove all paper calendars from the office, as they are pervasive throughout the environment. Grudin and Palen [9] found that successful adoption was achieved through encouragement of group leaders and peer pressure. Once certain members of the company started using GCS, they refused to accept any bookings through any other medium. This forced their workmates to adopt it as a new way of working. 2.3. Personal calendar use versus communication device To encourage adoption, GCS must address personal calendar use. Palen identified six different ways in which people interact with calendars: temporal orientation, scheduling, tracking, reminding, note recording/archiving, and retrieval/recall. Paper calendars support these activities through diverse designs. An electronic calendar must, therefore, reproduce all these functions. However, by supporting and encouraging them, electronic calendars are distancing the users from the communication facilities present in GCS. Calendars are, by their nature, a very personal and idiosyncratic tool in which every user stores a different form of information and refers to it in a different way. By promoting such facilities as a replacement for a paper calendar for the single user, GCS are more likely to become a private and personal tool, thereby minimizing their usefulness as a communication device [6]. 2.4. Sharing temporal information and privacy Grudin analyzed why simple electronic meeting booking systems failed. He found that ‘‘free time’’

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in many employees’ calendars was not truly free. Instead, availability needed to be checked with the person or his/her secretary in order to check for an appropriate time. This complaint is also discussed in another study [13]. Palen suggested that everyone involved in a GCS network should make his/her calendar open to all in the network. However, this brings privacy to the fore. By presenting personal temporal information to the company, that individual is opening him/herself to peer judgement about time allocation and preferences. Most users are reluctant to do this. To support her suggestion for open calendar environment, Palen presents the case of Sun Microsystems, where everyone is able to view everybody else’s calendar. Employees in Sun Microsystems worked around the privacy problem in many ways, e.g. many personal and private appointments were given a deliberately cryptic description. When an employee had to collect his son from school, he entered an appointment with his son’s name and no other information than duration. His close workmates knew his son’s name and understood but anyone else would consider it a regular business appointment. Paradoxically, social anonymity in an organization of 20,000 employees helped control access; while all could read all calendars, few were known to everyone. Thus, privacy breakdowns did occur, but far less than one might expect. Mosier and Tammaro [18] suggested that successful use may be attributed to a variety of factors like training and support, graphical quality of the product user interface, characteristics of the users’ tasks, etc. In summary, GCS have been underused for many years. Although its use is increasing, it has not reached critical mass in most environments.

3. A temporal approach to GCS Time is one of the fundamental aspects of human existence. ‘Sociotemporal order’ [24] is also a fundamental substratum of social organization. It regulates the structure and dynamics of social life. GCS may intrude in and affect the sociotemporal order. As time is the essential aspect of calendar applications and time management, time itself deserves substantial inquiry, but it has not been explored accordingly. The situation is similar in organization and management studies and

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information systems research where time is considered taken-for-granted. Only recently, partly due to the advent of the new millennium, scholars in social sciences and management studies have been enlightened on the complex nature of time [1,2,23]. Time is not an easy concept. There are a variety of views of time in various disciplines. Two contrasting views on time that are widely accepted in sociology and organization theory are clock time and social time [15]. The first is characterized as homogeneous, divisible, linear, uniform in its flow, objective and absolute, i.e. existing independent of objects and events, measurable, and singular, with one and only one ‘correct’ time. This is the basis of research not only in management and organization studies, but also in information systems research. ‘Time as a resource or an asset’ is a spin-off of this concept. The concept of social time insists that time is a problematic concept which requires sociological inquiry. It has several variations. Some suggest that time should be recognized as a subjective phenomenon, where time is shared (or owned) by a subject or entity, whether it is an individual, group, organization or any other entity. Time is an essential aspect of (organizational) culture [16]. Others emphasize the plurality of time. Among work and professional groups in organizations there are differences in the time dimensions of organizational culture, e.g. norms of time. Whatever aspects of time may be highlighted, and whatever they may be called (social time, organizational time, subjective time, the plurality of time, event time, etc.), they share an underlying assumption that time is socially constructed. The new temporal approach to GCS suggests that the social time concept can be applied to a study of GCS. Different cultures, organizations or professional groups have different perceptions of time and different ways of organizing it. Managers’ time is more highly valued than that of their subordinates’. Therefore, managers’ are entitled to trespass on their subordinates’ temporal domain, whereas their temporal domain is culturally protected. This is one reason why people are reluctant to call a meeting with their seniors via GCS and why GCS are little used. These considerations can contribute to the effective design and implementation of GCS [5]. The notions of mono- and poly-chronicity [11,14] are another reason that may explain why some people

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make little use of their calendars for scheduling. In mono-chronocity, each task is performed one-at-atime, whilst in poly-chronicity several things are done at once. People who follow a mono-chronic order find their work very easy to schedule. On the other hand, those whose work follows a poly-chronic order have difficulties in scheduling their time: they are juggling several tasks at any given moment. For them, it is difficult to schedule work in advance. Barley [3] showed that radiologists and technicians in radiology department in hospitals live in different worlds of temporality.

4. GCS use in an organization The study presented here examines the use of GCS in a business organization. The aim of the study is to explore issues in the area of GCS, which will help develop propositions for future research. The study was conducted in a local division of one of the world’s largest computer manufacturers. In 1998, both Microsoft Exchange and different versions of Microsoft Outlook were used in the company. Then, everyone was required to upgrade to Microsoft Outlook 98 as part of the Y2K compliance project. Therefore, everyone had access to GCS when the study was conducted at the end of 1999. Data were collected by questionnaires. Among 200 questionnaires distributed, 141 were returned. Table 1 shows the distribution of the respondents by sex, rank, age and IT skills. At the beginning of the questionnaire, three types of Table 1 Respondents Frequency (%) Sex

Male Female

103 (73.0) 38 (27.0)

Rank

Managers Staff

29 (20.6) 112 (79.4)

Age

Under 30 31–40 Above 41

62 (44.0) 41 (29.0) 38 (27.0)

IT skills

Advanced Intermediate Beginners

76 (53.9) 59 (41.8) 6 (4.3)

Total

141 (100)

Table 2 Main calendar Frequency (%) Paper calendar Personal organizer Electronic groupware Total

59 (41.8) 17 (12.1) 65 (46.1)

Pure users among main users (%) 32 (54.2) 8 (47.1) 22 (33.8)

141 (100)

calendars available in today’s office environments were presented: paper calendars (diaries, filofaxes, etc.), electronic personal organizers (e.g. Psion organizer), and groupware calendars (network-based calendars, e.g. MS Outlook and Lotus Notes). Then the questionnaire asked about the respondent’s use of the calendars, their accessibility and GCS meeting request. When asked which is the main calendar used, 46% of the respondents chose GCS (Table 2). However, pure GCS users, using only GCS, were 34%, which is lower than pure paper and pure electronic organizer users. The rest of the self-claimed GCS users use paper calendars and/or personal organizers along with GCS. This implies that GCS is not a stand-alone tool yet and is supplemented by other forms of calendar [4]. Four questions were asked for each type of calendar:  Do you (or are you willing to) allow colleagues to view your calendar?  Do you (or are you willing to) allow colleagues to alter your calendar?  Do you (or are you willing to) view your colleagues’ calendars?  Do you (or are you willing to) alter your colleagues’ calendars? In each type of calendar, as seen in Table 3, more are willing to allow colleagues to view their calendar, but less to allow them to alter it. Likewise more prefer to read their colleagues’ calendars and less to alter it. Among the three types, the acceptability of the four questions is significantly high in the GCS. This suggests that people may accept the open calendar system when it is implemented. Among the 113 who responded to the question asking reasons for viewing colleagues’ calendars, the majority (70%) ticked ‘locating colleagues’. Further asked what they would like to view and show, they only wanted to view whether their colleagues

H. Lee / Information & Management 40 (2003) 159–164 Table 3 Calendar accessibility by calendar type (%)

Allow colleagues to view Allow colleagues to alter Willing to view others Willing to alter others

Paper calendar

Personal organizer

Groupware calendar

58.3 21.0 41.4 20.4

28.9 14.6 19.6 16.0

86.3 49.5 76.7 45.7

Table 4 Reasons for viewing colleagues’ calendars (multiple responses) Percent Scheduling their work Locating colleagues Tracking their past appointments Updating their schedule for my information Others

23.9 69.9 15.9 35.4 8.8

were busy and whether they were in the office. They did not wish to view and show detailed contents in their calendar. This result is partly in line with the issue of disparity in work and benefit. They may see detailed content as demanding additional work (Table 4). As for the willingness to send an electronic meeting request (Table 5), there are some differences observed by rank, IT skills, and gender. The relative rank and relationship of the requestor to the recipient in the organizational hierarchy may affect the likelihood of his/her using the electronic meeting request. Table 5 Willingness to send an electronic meeting request Yes (%)

No (%)

Total (%)

Sex

Male Female

80 (77.7) 24 (63.2)

23 (22.3) 14 (36.8)

103 (100) 38 (100)

Rank

Managers Staff

25 (86.2) 79 (70.5)

4 (13.8) 33 (29.5)

29 (100) 112 (100)

Age

Under 30 31–40 Above 41

45 (72.6) 30 (73.2) 29 (76.3)

17 (27.4) 11 (26.8) 9 (23.7)

62 (100) 41 (100) 38 (100)

IT skills

Advanced Intermediate Beginner

63 (82.9) 39 (66.1) 2 (33.3)

13 (17.1) 20 (33.9) 4 (66.7)

76 (100) 59 (100) 6 (100)

104 (73.8)

37 (26.2)

141 (100)

Total

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Table 6 Likeliness to send a meeting request to a person in different groups or higher ranks Definitely May be Definitely not Colleagues with your group Colleagues outside your group Middle management Senior management

69.2 43.1 29.6 25.0

30.8 55.6 62.0 41.7

0.0 1.4 8.5 33.3

Table 6 shows how likely ordinary members of staff (79 persons), non-managers, are to send an electronic meeting request to a person in different groups and higher levels in the organization. The numbers in the table show consistent patterns of ‘the higher the recipient’s rank, the less likely’ and ‘the more distant the relationship, the less likely’.

5. Conclusions By being aware of, and sensitive to, time, which has a variety of faces, researchers and developers of GCS will become more knowledgeable about phenomena surrounding the use of GCS in organizations than when exclusively relying—probably unconsciously— on the simple concept of time, clock time. Some findings from this exploratory study suggest that a temporal perspective can provide new approaches to some problems in this area, such as differential usage by organizational rank. This study also found that many people did not depend on a single type of calendar, but used a couple of different types of calendars. This finding raises a need to understand the combined use of different types of calendars. Information and communication technologies are transforming patterns of working and generating new forms of organizations. The essence of new patterns is summed up by words like ‘mobile’, ‘virtual’, ‘flexible’, etc. In these new working patterns, members of an organization spend increasingly less time in shared physical space. This inevitably reduces the chance of face-to-face interactions, and makes less easy the business of scheduling meetings among team members distributed, possibly globally. In this regard, one of the findings in this study that attracts attention while concluding the paper is that the main reason

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for viewing colleagues’ calendar is ‘locating them’. Given changes in working patterns, not only GCS, but also calendar applications such as PDA and web-based calendars will play an increasingly important role in facilitating coordination among team members in emerging virtual forms of organizations. Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank Nicola Kingston-Davies for her help with data collection, and the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. References [1] American Behavioral Scientist, Special issue on temporal dimensions of employment relations 44 (7) 2001. [2] Academy of Management Review, Special topic forum on time and organizational research 26 (4) 2001. [3] S. Barley, On technology, time, and social order: technologically induced change in the temporal organization of radiological work, in: F. Dubinskas (Ed.), Making Time: Ethnographies of High-Technology Organizations, Temple University, Philadelphia, 1988, pp. 123–169. [4] A. Blandford, T. Green, Group and individual time management tools: what you get is not what you need, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 5 (4), 2001, pp. 213–230. [5] E. Egger, I. Wagner, Time-management: a case of CSCW, in: Proceedings of CSCW’92 Conference, 1992. [6] S. Ehrlich, Strategies for encouraging successful adoption of office communication systems, ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems 5 (4), 1987, pp. 340–357. [7] J. Grudin, Why CSCW applications fail: problems in design and evaluation, Office: Technology and People 4 (3), 1989, pp. 245–264. [8] J. Grudin, Groupware and social dynamics: eight challenges for developers, Communications of the ACM 37 (1), 1994, pp. 92–105. [9] J. Grudin, L. Palen, Why groupware succeeds: discretion or mandate, in: Proceedings of ECSCW’95 Conference, 1995. [10] J. Grudin, S. Poltrock, Computer-supported cooperative work and groupware, in: M. Zelkowitz (Ed.), Advances in Computers: Emphasizing Parallel Programming Techniques, Vol. 45, 1997, pp. 269–320.

[11] E. Hall, The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time, Doubleday, New York, 1983. [12] N. Kamel, R. Davison, Applying CSCW technology to overcome traditional barriers in group interactions, Information & Management 34, 1998, pp. 209–219. [13] C. Kincaid, P. Dupont, A. Kaye, Electronic calendars in the office: an assessment of user needs and current technology, ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems 3 (1), 1985, pp. 89–102. [14] H. Lee, Time and information technology: mono-chronicity, poly-chronicity and temporal symmetry, European Journal of Information Systems 8, 1999, pp. 16–26. [15] H. Lee, J. Liebenau, Time in organizational studies: towards a new research direction, Organization Studies 20 (6), 1999, pp. 1035–1058. [16] H. Lee, R. Varey, Impacts of computer-mediated communication on cultural aspects at work, Cognition, Technology and Work 1, 1999, pp. 153–161. [17] M. Markus, T. Connolly, Why CSCW applications fail: problems in the adoption of interdependent work tools, in: Proceedings of CSCW’90 Conference, 1990, pp. 371–380. [18] J. Mosier, S. Tammaro, When are group scheduling tools useful? Computer Supported Cooperative Work: The Journal of Collaborative Computing 6 (1), 1997, pp. 53–70. [19] W. Orlikowski, Learning from notes: organizational issues in groupware implementation, in: Proceedings of CSCW’92 Conference, 1992, pp. 363–369. [20] L. Palen, Calendars on the new frontier: challenges of groupware technology, Doctoral dissertation, Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, 1998. [21] L. Palen, Social, individual and technological issues for groupware calendar systems, in: Proceedings of ACM CHI’99 Conference, 1999. [22] J. Pino, H. Mora, Scheduling meetings using participants’ preferences, Information Technology and People 11 (2), 1998, pp. 140–151. [23] Work and Occupations: An International Sociological Journal, Special issue on time at work 28 (1) 2001. [24] E. Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1981. Heejin Lee is a lecturer in the Department of Information Systems and Computing, Brunel University, United Kingdom. He received his PhD from London School of Economics. His research interests include time and information technology, calendar applications, broadband Internet, and electronic commerce. He has published in European Journal of Information Systems, Accounting, Management & Information Technologies, Organization Studies, and Time & Society. He edited a special issue on ‘Time and Information Technology’ for The Information Society.