Breakdown analysis on distributed group communication

This paper reports on findings from two case studies that each case applies the same synchronous communication facilities including dataconferencing and videoconferencing in four distributed team members. The two virtual teams collaborated their works through intranet and Internet connections by following five design stages from design briefing to final concept accomplishment. The purpose of the study is to identify the breakdowns of the distributed group communication in the above two cases. The underlying theory of the study is the breakdown analysis. Accordingly, the research framework is generated from the breakdown analysis on user-user, user-tool and user-task interactions. One major finding of the study is that both network environments result the same problem of board width. Another finding is that the breakdown depends on the preparation of the asynchronous Web site materials facilitating group discussion in the conference. The other finding is that the breakdowns variedly occurred within participants who are not familiar with one another.