Module 3 – Case
COLLABORATION TECHNOLOGIES AND IT INFRASTRUCTURE
Assignment Overview
Working in teams separated by time zones is always a challenge. For this Case you will be assigned to a team of 5 other students. This will provide an opportunity for you to use a collaboration group tool or tools as you research an issue of IT Infrastructure to support your collaborative learning and to share your findings with other members of your team. Have your professor pre-approve this topic for the team. Post a discussion of the team processes and the team’s conclusions on the IT infrastructure topic selected to your individual case area. Be sure to include references to support your discussion. It is very important that you provide a detailed analysis of the team interaction and your opinion of the team results.
Case Assignment
Collaborative Work
You will see the members of your team in the announcement area; your professor will also email the names of your team members. Reach out early and get to know each other. Those who live in time zones that make it difficult to interact with the team or who have some other difficulty can opt to do the project independently with the professor’s approval. In the discussion on group processes, reflection on groups in which you have worked in the past is acceptable.
Each team should agree on which collaboration tool to use (e.g., Skype or Zoom https://www.zoom.us/) for group meeting video conferencing. Using your trident.edu email address gives you access to a free Zoom account for sessions up to 40 minutes. Once an account is created, the team leader can send the Zoom link to all team members for your face-to-face meetings, in which you can also share screens. For document sharing, Google Docs is recommended. Here is a video on how to share Google documents with others (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFE1iCPafTA). A Gmail account is required to use Google Docs. Google Docs allows the team members to access on the same document as you prepare your Case.
In this assignment, you are required to write a report and discuss the following:
*This will provide an opportunity for you to use a collaboration group tool or tools as you research an issue of IT Infrastructure to support your collaborative learning and to share your findings with other members of your team.
*Reflect on your experience with interacting with the team members: what you learn from others and yourself through this collaboration, whether the collaboration is successful, what problems/issues occur and why, how they are addressed, how you can do better next time when the similar circumstances occur. Please note that this reflection on team experience is based on your experience, these questions mean for prompt you for self-reflection, not necessarily mandatory questions that must be addressed since each team is different. Depending on what happened in your team, reflections are different from person to person.
Assignment Expectations
This Case is to cover team processes and the IT infrastructure to support team processes. For the IT infrastructure, refer to Module 3, Lecture 1: Business IT Networks and Components (above). The IT infrastructure consists of components identified as hardware, software, communication systems, data resources, and people. These components apply to information systems, and in Module 3, you will be analyzing collaboration systems. Your Case will:
*Discuss the backgrounds of each
*Present findings on the IT infrastructure to support team processes discussing hardware, software, communication systems, data resources, and people for the selected tool or application, and providing a comparison across the various group collaboration tools.
*Include references to support your discussion with a detailed analysis of the team interaction and your opinion of the team results. (Reflect on teams you have worked with in the past if you did the project independently. If they were not virtual teams, then speculate how the Group Technology would have changed your team experience.)
