Abstract Attempting an introduction to CSCW for readers who have not yet jumped on this bandwagon, let me start with a confession I’ve made to colleagues in a number of bars at conferences and after meetings: over the last decade I’ve felt like a charlatan claiming expertise in all sorts of IT areas, but it’s really all the same stuff. I asked the same questions about expert systems, knowledge elicitation, hypertext, and HCI in the 1980s, and I’m still asking the same questions about software engineering and systems analysis, maintenance, standards, CSCW and HCI. If you’re an information systems professional reading this article and have a solid background in at least two of the IT areas mentioned so far, then you won’t have much difficulty in understanding CSCW.