Effects of an Electronic Meeting System Group Writing Tool on the Quality of Written Documents

It is found that EMS technology significantly improved planning quality over manual support, and groups wrote longer documents and, in comparison to manual groups with imposed planning, better documents.

Abstract

Electronic meeting systems (EMS) technology can effectively support groups in a diverse set of meeting functions. The introduction of the Groupwriter tool allows group composition of documents in a highly efficient environment. To test this tool, we conducted an experiment to compare the quality of policy and procedure docu ments written by groups in three face-to-face treatments: (a) those using the EMS Groupwriter tool with a planning guide; (b) those using pen and paper with a planningguide; and (c) those using only pen and paper. The dependent variables were planning quality, document length, document quality, and member satisfac tion with document quality. We found that EMS technology significantly improved planning quality over manual support. EMS groups wrote longer documents and, in comparison to manual groups with imposed planning, better documents. Mem ber satisfaction with document quality was not statistically different for all three treatments.