The future of enterprise groupware applications

This paper provides a review of groupware technology and products. The purpose of this review is to investigate the appropriateness of current groupware technology as the basis for future enterprise systems and evaluate its role in realising, the currently emerging, Virtual Enterprise model for business organisation. It also identifies in which way current technological phenomena will transform groupware technology and will drive the development of the enterprise systems of the future

Web 2.0 technologies for learning: the current landscape – opportunities, challenges and tensions: supplementary materials

These supplementary materials accompany the report ‘Web 2.0 technologies for learning: the current landscape – opportunities, challenges and tensions’, which is the first report from research commissioned by Becta into Web 2.0 technologies for learning at Key Stages 3 and 4. This report describes findings from the commissioned literature review of the then current landscape concerning learner use of Web 2.0 technologies and the implications for teachers, schools, local authorities and policy makers

SAGA reloaded: towards a generic platform for developing cooperative applications

Groupware specification and development has always been a complex task, requiring special attention to issues such as notification of cooperative actions and ensuring consistency of shared data. Some years ago SAGA was developed as a framework to build groupware applications based on a set of core web services that provide the most common cooperative functionalities. Despite its potential, the last few years brought some technological developments that placed new challenges. This paper presents a new generation of the SAGA platform that adds to the original framework features that emerged recently, namely the regulation of social interaction, incorporation of new communication technologies, connectors to several external services and interaction environments, and the addition of contextual information

Informal eCollaboration Channels: Shedding Light on “Shadow CIT”

There is some evidence of the unabated proliferation of employee-autonomous, informal in an enterprise sense, collaborative information technologies (CITs) to perform collaborative activities despite huge investments in CIT enterprise systems. This article will introduce the metaphorical construct of “shadow CIT” (similar to “shadow IT” – Raden, 2005; Schaffner, 2007) to describe the strategic choice to use autonomous CITs instead of formal enterprise CITs. “Shadow IT” has been defined by Raden (2005) as a set of IT tools used “for performing IT functions but not part of the mainstream IT organization” (p.1). Similarly, “shadow CIT” solutions are employee-autonomous: they are not implemented as part of the organisational IT infrastructure, neither have they received any targeted organisational investment. Several research questions are explored in this paper. The existence of “shadow IT” has been argued to imply a failure on the part of enterprise IT to provide all of the services to meet their users‟ needs. Does the existence of “shadow CIT” imply a failure of enterprise CITs of a similar kind? If shadow CITs are found to be [capable of] filling gaps within enterprise CITs, what kind of gaps are these? Often, without being able to articulate why, users appear to shun solutions and good architecture within enterprise CITs in favour of the ability to get their work done through autonomous “shadow” solutions. What kind of motivation may be driving such decisions

An Investigation into the Potential Use of Social Media Technologies to improve the Product Development Functions within the Aerospace and Defence Industry

Competition in global markets has resulted in increased demands for improvements in manufacturing processes. Enterprises have to re-engineer work practices and have shown that the effective communication of knowledge is fundamental to Product Development (PD). It is vital that cross-functional internal and external collaboration is optimised within PD processes and this should be facilitated through early, frequent and effective communication of information and knowledge. Social Media sites represent a new stage in the evolution of the Internet. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter, offer users the ability to stay connected online with friends and colleagues around the world in real-time; similarly, they offer the ability to locate expertise, knowledge and solutions to problems. The results of an industrial investigation, carried out within a leading aerospace and defence organisation, are commented upon and an interactive groupware solution is introduced, which aims to facilitate collaboration between dispersed product development teams

An Investigation into Collaboration and Knowledge Management during Product Development in the Aerospace and Defence Industry

Organisations need to overcome a number of challenges, including improving knowledge management, to ensure competitiveness in today’s global business environment. Product development and engineering design decisions are typically based on the knowledge available within enterprises. An ability to quickly discover and capture this knowledge and communicate with colleagues is required to enable effective outputs. An in-depth industry investigation, conducted within a leading manufacturing organisation in the Aerospace and Defence Industry (ADI), confirmed that knowledge management is only average. Employees would welcome the introduction of new technology to improve knowledge sharing and feel competent to use Web 2.0 and social media technologies. Based on the investigation, an interactive groupware prototype employing collaborative Web 2.0 technologies has been proposed. The prototype will be introduced as a case study to engineers within the collaborating company during product development projects with benefits in productivity and collaborative practices being assessed

Horizontal Collaborative e-Purchasing for Hospitals: IT for Addressing Collaborative Purchasing Impediments

Horizontal collaborative purchasing (HCP) has often been cited as a way for hospitals to address the challenges of the rising healthcare costs. However, hospitals do not seem to utilize horizontal collaborative purchasing on any large scale, and recent initiatives have had mixed results. Focusing on Dutch hospitals, in this paper we present major impediments for collaborative purchasing, resulting in a first component of our proposed electronic horizontal collaborative purchasing model for hospitals; as a second component it contains a collaborative purchasing typology. A first validation round with hospital purchasing professionals, described separately in Kusters and Versendaal (2011), confirmed four applicable purchasing types and fourteen salient collaborative purchasing impediments. The model is operationalized by including possible information technology (IT) solutions that address the specific fourteen impediments. This model is validated through methodological triangulation of four different validation techniques. We conclude that IT has the potential to support, or overcome, the impediments of HCP. The validation also reveals the need to distinguish between more process-related, as opposed to social-related, obstacles; the immediate potential for IT solutions is greater for the process-related impediments. Ultimately, we conclude that the collaborative e-purchasing model (e-HCP) and implementation roadmap can be used by healthcare consortia, branche organizations, partnering healthcare institutes and multi-site healthcare institutes as a means to help identifying strategies to initiate, manage and evaluate collaborative purchasing practices