Future research in group support systems: needs, some questions and possible directions

Group support systems (GSS) represent one of the real success stories of research by the MIS academic community. There is no doubt that GSS academic research has had an impact on practice in the MIS field. This paper discusses the future of GSS research in terms of what is needed, some important research questions, and offers some possible directions. Section 1 describes what a GSS is and explains the underlying fundamental background. Section 2 explains why GSS research is needed. Section 3 describes the multimethodological approach that is needed for well-grounded GSS research programs. Section 4 discusses some of the major issues in applying GSS in organizational settings. Section 5 explores the scope of GSS research and the questions that need to be answered. Section 6 provides keys to successful distributed collaboration from our experience. Section 7 starts to answer the difficult question “what is needed for a distributed workspace?” Section 8 begins to clarify just what virtual reality can offer for distributed collaboration. Section 9 explains the justification for a virtual reality representation of the distributed office. Section 10 explores what we need to get real work done in a virtual workspace including: support for sense making during the process, automating bottlenecks in the process, modeling through simulation and animation, multiple languages, education, crisis response and software inspection. Research in GSS is just beginning and thousands of questions must be answered before we can have an understanding of the field.