Grants making is a collaboration-intensive activity with collaborations in both the intra- and inter-organizational contexts. Since these activities cut across both time and space, collaborative technologies present attractive possibilities for improved communication and performance. Over the years, electronic mail, workflow, and virtual meeting technologies have been deployed by organizations to enhance the effectiveness of their collaboration tasks. When used appropriately, these collaborative technologies can foster creativity, improve the quality of discussions, save time, and be satisfying to use. However, determining what constitutes appropriate use of these technologies is a nontrivial undertaking. These technologies appear to be most helpful for groups that experience communication problems due to their size, for groups that handle complex problems or tasks, and for virtual teams with members located in different places, all of which are found in the grants-making process.

The grants-supported research enterprise presents several excellent opportunities for studying collaboration and collaboration tools. Each opportunity includes a range of collaboration activities focused on different aspects of the enterprise. The development and definition of research initiatives, for example, which involve granting agencies, interested constituencies, potential investigators, and political leaders. Proposal preparation may involve investigators in different departments or different institutions. Proposal evaluation and selection often involves geographically distributed review panels.

Grants management involves collaboration among administrators and program officers in the granting agency along with research administrators and investigators in the grantee organizations. Successful deployment of collaboration technologies in grants making presents several research challenges. A salient feature of collaborative technologies is their ability to improve the exchange of both common and unique knowledge among the participants. However, mere exchange of knowledge does not enhance the quality of collaborative activity, which requires better understanding of the deeper structures and processes of collaboration. From a practical perspective, the challenge is to change the way people work by encouraging experimentation, enabling careful reflection and evaluation of ideas and action, adopting and inventing new best practices, and developing special purpose processes and tools. A related challenge is to identify best practices that can be extracted from one setting and adapted for use in others.

Too often organizations import beliefs and theories from the "old media" (i.e., paper-based work processes) and find that just automating the old ways does not bring significant benefit. New theories, new work processes, and new tools to reflect and inform emerging modes of group work are needed to advance collaboration initiatives and to guide the adoption of new work processes and structures engendered by technology use.