Tools make people and their coordination processes more efficient. As established in previous sections various solutions that deal with coordination challenges often function by sharing messages or documents, or employ tightly coupled workflow designs. The support for business processes, as mentioned above, typically focuses on supporting the coordination aspects of generally asynchronously executed business processes by individuals (WFMS); or on providing communication and cooperative support for groups dealing with more fluid, unstructured processes (e-mail, shared workspaces); or on a combination thereof, within more advanced virtual communities. This section therefore considers the optimisation efforts of collaborative tools, as with the supporting infrastructures, to account for their various limitations towards achieving effective coordination, at people and process levels, respectively. Table 3.7 presents some examples of some of the optimisation efforts considered.
3.2.3.1 People Level Tools Optimisation
Groupware, as previously stated, refers to a broad range of technologies designed to help people collaborate. It includes a wide range of application technologies that support tasks executed by people in groups, varying in size and composition. Groupware mechanisms support coordination through information system services, which enable knowledge/information management (capturing, processing, storage, and its exchange)
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through: electronic calendaring and scheduling, along with shared databases. They can function separately, but may also be combined to fit a purpose.
Table 3.7: Collaboration Tools Optimisation Efforts
TOOLS COOPERATIVE GROUPWARE WORKFLOW
MANAGEMENT VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES
Paper based artefact,
Post-it note, letter, telephone
Composite synchronous/asynchronous communication tools
Awareness tools (Integration focus)
E-mail notification alert system
Group calendar integration to allow
coordination by defining meetings accessible to specified members Intranet, extranet
Lotus notes: knowledge sharing
origin for collaborative environments + scripted language for workflow functionality
GroupKit
offers seamless coordination support within environment and allows third-
party extensions through the ―open
protocols‖
Toxic Farm suggest dynamic
integration through web services
Workflow management system Application integration Lotus notes , BSCW Toxic-farm traditional workflow engine + process awareness Oz, distributed heterogeneous point to point integration
Online virtual communities Online synchronous
/asynchronous collaborative tools +shared workspace awareness Context + Recommender systems (Amazon object based) social networking
Technical interoperability
Permit third party tools extension through open protocol; application integration
EGovernment Portal
integration (multiple portlets) OneStopGOV Active live event
Portals. (frontend integration)
Backend integration: process +
data integration.
Ontology driven integration
More sophisticated communities, e.g. Facebook, account for both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration tools, and are often employed to varying degrees in virtual communities. Asynchronous collaboration tools include: document sharing software, group calendaring, and newsgroups. Synchronous tools incorporate virtual meeting rooms (group support systems), shared whiteboards, application sharing, and video/audio conferencing. However, the combination of support tools must be directed by need contexts. William (2003) advocates that the ideal mix of groupware types should be defined by a given situation.
The rapid growth of virtual teams cooperating over the Internet has increased the complexity of the corresponding cooperative applications, with several tools having been constructed to support such cooperation models. However, most of these tools are specialised, only concerned with one facet of cooperation, either communication or the ordering and structuring of tasks. The Internet and www provide a platform for the implementation of CSCW systems where protocols HTTP and HTML have been leveraged to support distributed workgroups (Leitch, 2000). According to Kalpic and Bernus (2006), intranets, extranets, web portals and the Internet at large have created a networking potential that drives corporations to work faster, create and manage more interdependencies, and operate on global scale.
Web 2.0 describes the increasingly popular tools that promote two-way communications on the Internet. These social tools include: ambient communication tools, e.g. tweeter,
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that support both synchronous and asynchronous messaging; blogs, wikis, social bookmarks, comment, shared workspaces, and polling (Bebensee et al., 2010). These tools differ from traditional publishing as they put the knowledge sharing facility into the hands of the users themselves (Gurteen, 2012). Cronk (2011) indicates that these web 2.0 tools ―facilitate the development of social capital through knowledge sharing, which in turn increases the potential to create intellectual capital thus, have been the basis for online communities.‖
Collaboration solutions exist that are integrated, scalable and general enough to address a large range of applications for distributed teams. For instance, a collaboration support tool, such as Glasscubes, brings together a collection of online collaboration tools to facilitate better teamwork and improved communication. Among the support tools are secure workspaces with control over invites, sharing of any type of file or document, calendars to organises multiple happenings within corporate meetings, events and conference calls, Dashboards, to make announcements, as well as to view the latest activity in a snapshot, and online project management, which allows one to create, assign and track task execution. However, similar to many others, Glasscubes is proprietary and not open for extension, with tasks being designed but not enacted. To facilitate flexibility, extensibility and agility in catering for more dynamic processes, a loosely coupled approach is advocated. Also, significantly, there is a need for semantic interoperability at the computer and process levels (Papazoglou & Ribbers, 2006). Commonly lacking from most existing solutions is the ability to exchange meaningful and context-driven data or messages between distributed autonomous systems. This underscores the requirements for shared meaning, tailorability and adaptability as important success factors for collaborative support, in view of the varied and dynamic nature of cooperative work requirements. The following subsection elaborates on the significance of support at the process level.
3.2.3.2 Process Level Tools Optimisation
Workflow application has continued to evolve to accommodate the continuously fluctuating, dynamic needs of work groups. While traditional workflow often requires a strictly defined protocol to function, users continue to ask for more adaptive workflow products and models, which have the facility to provide the robustness and security of the predefined scripts, in consort with the flexibility of ad-hoc applications (Lucinéia et al., 2003). Optimisation efforts of structured workflows extend beyond simply engaging human intervention during the course of execution, when exceptions occur. While concepts like role resolution at runtime, to determine an appropriate active role-player or control flow, depending on predefined conditions are inherent to most existing WFMS, some integrate rule-based approaches, such as Event-Condition-Action rules, to adapt
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the execution of processes when exceptions occur. Exception handling approaches permit users to change the process definitions of a running process.
Workflow systems, however, do not provide adequate support for exception handling, as designers cannot predict every unusual circumstance that may occur during process execution. Usually, exceptional conditions are not easily predicted until they occur. This is exacerbated by the limited level of dynamic support, as structured approaches assume that business process activities are always implemented in similar fashions, with few exceptions.
The integration of different application tools to support individual tasks is often tightly coupled with WFMS, as well as usually proprietary (Bergemann, Hausotter, & Koschel, 2009), making extensibility a difficult and demanding task. To manage more emergent situations or cooperative processes, where human interventions are predominantly required, WFMS subscribes to ad-hoc collaborative groupware to coordinate work and to manage such situations.
Typically, to support and avoid difficult manual adaptations, specific organisational procedures (delegation/hold-files), predefined adaptations (decision points/ad-hoc refinement) and knowledge of history are offered. In order to contend with situations of uncertainties adequately, and to enhance exception handling capabilities, while mitigating exception occurrences, service-oriented, flexible, adaptive, and context-aware workflow management is advocated (Heravizadeh & Edmond, 2008; Ngeow et al., 2007; Rosemann et al., 2006; Ranganathan & Campbell, 2003). According to Heravizadeh and Edmond (2008) context-aware workflows present a route towards overcoming the shortcomings of workflow management systems. Context-aware enabled workflows can support knowledge-intensive tasks, where the people performing such tasks are subject to a fair degree of uncertainty. This denotes that people not only deal with support- predictable and easily automated decision-making, as with current workflow technologies, but also support situations that require the application of human factors, including experience, training, expertise and judgment. Furthermore, to support the seamless integration of process types and organisational or process knowledge, Abramowicz et al., (2009); Marjanovic (2005); Dutsdar & Hall (2002) stress the need for context driven, loosely-coupled integration (both frontend and backend interfaces) and process awareness.
Virtual communities increasingly make use of web services to support dynamic and loosely coupled integration and will continue to do so towards support of their collaborative activities (de Moor, & van den Heuvel, 2004). For instance, The Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA) adopts web-services to enable integration of services and resources across heterogonous distributed, dynamic environments and communities
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(Talia, 2002). Taking lessons from Grid computing, Thomas and Botha (2009) illustrated the feasibility of data integration across the SA public service using web services.
Abramowicz et al. (2009) highlight the magnitude of employing a service computing approach to detect, invoke and orchestrate services seamlessly with semantic rich inference rules and context information. This emphasises the need to define context ontologies to support smooth and effective collaboration. For instance, by integrating a variety of user interface service types, the seamless and dynamic selection of the most appropriate mode of interaction becomes possible. Efforts towards seamless coordination can benefit from approaches that support contextualised, proactive and personalised access to services and their offerings. For example, most online virtual communities strive towards maximising member involvement, by offering optimal degrees of interactivity and personalised services, based on various factors, including user preferences, interests and locations. To facilitate the collaborative effort of existing groups with shared goals, while leveraging opportunities for potential collaborators, without initial or previous ties, requires both group and community level awareness, guided by context information.
In common with most web-based cooperative groupware, virtual communities can support the collaborative work of previously-organised people with shared objectives. Additionally, they account for ad-hoc knowledge processes that support diverse and unstructured groups of people sharing interests and preferences, with no obvious goals. In essence, virtual communities can employ the capabilities of ad-hoc process tools to coordinate in their communities. Some virtual communities leverage context (user preference information) to trigger spontaneous collaboration by identifying opportunities, aside from awareness information that synchronises groups relative to the state of on- going tasks. Communities utilise electronic tools, comprising forums, chat rooms, e-mail lists, message boards, and other interactive Internet mechanisms, synthesised and tailored to the particular requirements of the community.