earticle

영어

Technology today has made it possible for people to opt for ‘Teleworking or virtual distributed team work’, which seems to be received unarguably and positive acceptance as an alternative work practices globally. In this context, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has to be credited as one of major ‘change elements’ which enable to drive constructive changes in a working environment and arrangement in an organization, that enable employees to work from anywhere, at any time around the globe and across geographical boundaries regardless of differences in languages, cultures and time zones. The new transformation indirectly demands significant challenges to the organization in order to conform the needs and necessities for these current working practices. The challenges include ICT investment in the infrastructure and applications particularly to overcome the communication and collaboration barrier, which is the result of lack of social, physical and face-to-face interaction. However, it is occasionally difficult to find the best model to support services that can suit the needs of virtual team work or telework in certain domain. The primary objective of this study is to develop a model for distributed working group that supports unified communication and collaboration, particularly in the context of public sector in Malaysia. The sample consists of 92 respondents from the Malaysia Ministry of Rural and Regional Development (MRRD) and the Rural Transformation Centres (RTC). The statistical analysis found that among the main features that meet the needs of the group work are, the ability to share and access the information, the capability to submit reports periodically and provides an interactive environment. The unified communication and collaboration model proposed by this study focuses on synchronous and asynchronous activities. In this model, the ultimate goals of telework are defined and categorised into three groups of users which are the individual, team work and organisation.