Collaborative method to maintain business process models updated

Business process models are often forgotten after their creation and its representation is not usually updated. This appears to be negative as processes evolve over time. This paper discusses the issue of business process models maintenance through the definition of a collaborative method that creates interaction contexts enabling business actors to discuss about business processes, sharing business knowledge. The collaboration method extends the discussion about existing process representations to all stakeholders promoting their update. This collaborative method contributes to improve business process models, allowing updates based in change proposals and discussions, using a groupware tool that was developed. Four case studies were developed in real organizational environment. We came to the conclusion that the defined method and the developed tool can help organizations to maintain a business process model updated based on the inputs and consequent discussions taken by the organizational actors who participate in the processes.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Notes on structural analysis in a distributed collaboratory

The worldwide growth of communication networks and associated technologies provide the basic infrastructure for new ways of executing the engineering process. Collaboration amongst team members seperated in time and location is of particular importance. Two broad themes can be recognized in research pertaining to distributed collaboration. One theme focusses on the technical and technological aspects of distributed work, while the other emphasises human aspects thereof. The case of finite element structural analysis in a distributed collaboratory is examined in this paper. An approach is taken which has its roots in human aspects of the structural analysis task. Based on experience of how structural engineers currently approach and execute this task while utilising standard software designed for use on local workstations only, criteria are stated for a software architechture that could support collaborative structural analysis. Aspects of a pilot application and the results of qualitative performance measurements are discussed

A Collaborative System Architecture for Developing Digital Electronic Games

Educational electronic games have been gaining lots of space inside classrooms because of their contribution to the learning and motivation of the students. However, the development process of a game is complex and, normally, involves many people with different profiles, making it impossible for the teachers to develop games according to their pedagogical needs. Even though the existence of technical barriers, the teacher’s involvement in this process is fundamental, since they are the ones that have the expertise on the pedagogical components of the process. Through a collaborative process, it is possible to merge all needed elements for the development of educational electronic games, since it allows mutual help among the participants. Furthermore providing individual learning to each collaborator, through the exchange of ideas and experience gain throughout the project development. This article has the objective of creating a community for collaborative development, that includes the pedagogical features on the development of educational electronic games. For this we will present a collaborative system model, based on the roots of the 3C collaboration model: communication, coordination and cooperation

Digital Transformation in Higher Education – New Cohorts, New Requirements?

Digital transformation refers to changes that digital technologies cause and that influence various aspects of human life. Previous researchers mainly focused on the impact of the digital transformation in the context of commercial organisations and business processes. In this study, we aim to examine how digital transformation affects universities and students. We examine differences and changes in the usage of collaboration and communication platforms between different groups of members at the university and within the university lifecycle. To gain new insights, a qualitative case study with semi-structured interviews was conducted. One of the main results shows that Bachelor and Master students prefer the usage of social network sites for collaboration and communication while Ph.D. students and employees do not. Even though an increasing number of modern platforms for direct communication is offered, the results show that the communication between the groups of students and employees still takes place via email

Documenting design decision rationale to improve individual and team design decision making: An experimental evaluation

Individual and team decision-making have crucial influence on the level of success of every software project. Even though several studies were already conducted, which concerned design decision rationale documentation approaches, a few of them focused on performances and evaluated them in laboratory. This paper proposes a technique to document design decision rationale, and evaluates experimentally the impact such a technique has on effectiveness and efficiency of individual/team decision-making in presence of requirement changes. The study was conducted as a controlled experiment. Fifty post-graduate Master students performed in the role of experiment subjects. Documented design decisions regarding the Ambient Intelligence paradigm constituted the experiment objects. Main results of the experiment show that, for both individual and team-based decision-making, effectiveness significantly improves, while efficiency remains unaltered, when decision-makers are allowed to use, rather not use, the proposed design rationale documentation technique. Copyright 2006 ACM

Tycho: Facilitation Support for Groupware User Tests

Running user tests for groupware requires tracking the progress of multiple users performing co-dependent tasks, while facilitating and observing their coordinated actions. This requirement negatively impacts the main objective of user testing, which is detecting usability flaws. User testing of groupware becomes more challenging when run remotely. Even if there are tools for remote user testing that can get the job done for a single user, they are not prepared for collaborative scenarios. In this paper we argue that tool support for the facilitation of user tests of groupware is missing. Consequently, we propose a method for user tests with tool assistance that makes it possible to automate task synchronization, especially for different workflows that must be run concurrently. We evaluated our proposal by comparing it to a manually facilitated approach during on-site coordinated user tests. The results indicate that, while the task of designing and running user tests with tool support takes more time, it allows the testers to better focus on detecting usability problems.Fil: Grigera, Julián. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentina. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas; ArgentinaFil: Gardey, Juan Cruz. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; ArgentinaFil: Fernandez, Alejandro. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentina. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas; ArgentinaFil: Garrido, Alejandra. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentin

Mediated Chat 2.0, Embedding Coordination into Chat Tools

Abstract. This research project investigates the coordination of debates using chat tools. In order to evaluate the Mediated Chat 2.0 tool, which implements coordination mechanisms to facilitate the application of group conversation techniques, debates were held during a distance education course using the AulaNet learningware. The logs were analyzed to evaluate how appropriately the proposed mechanisms helped during the coordination of the chat

Combining knowledge discovery, ontologies, annotations, and semantic wikis

Semantic Wikis provide an original and operational infrastructure for efficiently com- bining semantic technologies and collaborative design activities. This text presents: a running example and its context (organization of the collections in a museum); concepts of wikis as a tool to allow computer supported cooperative work (cscw); concepts of se- mantic technologies and knowledge representation; concepts and examples of semantic wikis; anatomy of a semantic wiki (reasoning tools, storage, querying); and research directions.Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad

Modelagem do aprendizado de grupos de alumnos em ambientes colaborativos utilizando data mining

Este artigo descreve um estudo de modelagem do aprendizado de grupos de alunos em ambientes colaborativos utilizando técnicas de Data Mining. Um agente inteligente é proposto para extrair padrões a partir de uma base de dados que contém informações sobre as interações dos alunos entre si e com o ambiente colaborativo. A partir dos padrões extraídos, o professor pode ter uma noção mais concreta do que o grupo realmente está aprendendo, bem como possuir uma visão geral do processo ensino-aprendizado.Eje: Tecnología Informática aplicada en Educación (TIE)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

A dinâmica e as suas propriedades dos ambientes de desenvolvimento distribuído de software: um estudo de caso

O desenvolvimento distribuído de software (DDS) pode reduzir o tempo e o custo de produção, por isso a quantidade de organizações que ingressam nesta modalidade, estabelecendo parcerias, é cada vez mais crescente. Os ambientes de DDS carregam consigo um conjunto de propriedades. Este artigo apresenta algumas propriedades comuns destes ambientes que foram identificadas a partir de um estudo de caso e de um modelo de dinâmica da rede associados aos mecanismos de coordenação. O trabalho de mapeamento discutido nesta pesquisa auxilia o gerenciamento mais eficaz da rede uma vez que identifica pontos comuns que podem revelar impasses e esclarecer um posicionamento geral da rede.The software distributed development (SDD) can reduce the time and the production cost for this reason many organizations join in this modality. The quantity of these partnerships is more e and more growing. The SDD environment has a group of properties. This article presents some common properties of these environments that were identified from a case study and of a network dynamics model, considering the coordination mechanisms. The mapping discussed in this research helps the most effective network management because it identifies common points that can reveal trouble and it explains a general positioning of the networkRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI