Browsing by Author "Teräs, Enni"

The need for interprofessional collaboration has increased as products and services have become more diverse. According to previous studies, experts can achieve objectives that would be impossible to achieve alone when collaborating. It is also possible to reach the desired outcome quicker, when working in collaboration. The intention of this study was to get information about the collaboration of experts working in a retail company’s Ecom process. Ecom is a process that requires experts from different functions to collaborate with one another. For this reason, this study uses the term cross-functional collaboration, along with the term interprofessional collaboration to the describe the collaboration of the experts. This study aimed to answer the questions, what kind of collaboration do the experts take part in and what characteristics arose as the experts described cross-functional collaboration. The research data was collected via a semi-structured interview. Seven Ecom process experts were individually interviewed. The interviewees were from sales, marketing, and IT. Content analysis was used to analyze the data. It was found that constant cross-functional collaboration was needed in the Ecom process. The experts had different experiences of the collaboration, depending on their job roles, tasks, and individual experiences. It was observed that the collaboration varied in intensity ranging from the transfer of information between functions, essential collaboration for the advancement of the process to ideation, planning and developing together. Relation expertise, collective information and cooperative procedures arose as the results for the second research question. Features related to relation expertise e.g., understanding the expertise of others and the other functions, and also shared information and cooperative procedures, which related to both research questions, suggested that recognizing and understanding boundaries is substantial for cross-functional collaboration. The results of this study are aligned with previous studies of what supports interprofessional collaboration and the significance of relational expertise and boundary crossing for collaboration, combining these research topics.