An experimental study of workflow and collaborative document authoring in medical research

Workflow is asynchronous technology widely used in the automation of organisational processes. Workflow provides benefits such as greater efficiency in an organisation, better worker productivity and greater process control. Synchronous collaborative authoring tools are technologies that allow a group of dispersed authors to write a document at the same time. These tools are beneficial in assisting authors to write some proportion, if not all, of a document simultaneously. This paper presents findings from an experiment combining both workflow and collaborative authoring tools in a medical research environment. Studies investigating the combination of these tools are few, resulting in a lack of understanding of how this combination can effectively assist organisations in document-based processes. Overall, the combined workflow/collaborative authoring solution was found effective in the generation of a medical research paper.