Opportunities for proactive support of reuse and organizational learning in ad hoc collaborative work activity: a field study of proposal writing

Abstract

Creating successful proposals is critical to the success of many organizations. In spite of this, proposal generation is typically ad hoc, often inefficient and relies heavily on wisdom, skills and resources that participants accumulate informally over time. The study reported here highlights virtuous regularities in the content and procedures of proposal generation. Currently, most proposal writers only have a partial picture of those regularities and, even when they are aware of them, often cannot exploit them, resulting in perpetual improvisation, resource scavenging and oversights. We identify opportunities to develop solutions to address such problems by supporting reuse of content and procedures and enhancing organizational learning.