Design Concerns for Multiorganizational, Multistakeholder Collaboration: A Study in the Healthcare Industry

ABSTRACT Multiorganizational, multistakeholder (MO-MS) collaborations that may span organizational and national boundaries, present design challenges beyond those of smaller-scale collaborations. This study opens an exploratory research stream to discover and document design concerns for MO-MS collaboration systems beyond those of the single-task collaborations that have been the primary focus of collaboration engineering research. We chose the healthcare industry as the first target for this research because it has attributes common to many MO-MS domains, and because it faces significant challenges on a global scale, like the recent COVID-19 pandemic, for which MO-MS collaboration could offer solutions, as, for example, evidenced by the rapid collaborative development and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. To this end, we reviewed 6,609 articles to find 100 articles that offered insights about the design of MO-MS collaboration systems, then conducted 50 semi-structured interviews in two countries with expert practitioners in the field. From those sources, we derived an eleven-category set of design concerns for MO-MS collaboration systems and argue their generalizability to other MO-MS domains. We offer exemplar probe questions that designers can use to increase the breadth and depth of requirements gathering for MO-MS collaboration systems.