Jordan Janeiro

Elastic collaboration support: from workflow-based to emergent collaboration

This paper addresses the challenges of providing customized collaboration support to teams of experts. Current groupware systems only provide support for workflow-based collaboration, avoiding new forms of collaboration such as emergent collaboration. Therefore this paper proposes a elastic collaboration approach and its implementation in a groupware system.

Supporting elastic collaboration: integration of collaboration components in dynamic contexts

In dynamic problem-solving situations, groups and organizations have to become more flexible to adapt collaborative workspaces according to their needs. New paradigms propose to bridge two opposing process and ad-hoc perspectives to achieve such flexibility. However, a key challenge relies on the dynamic integration of groupware tools in the same collaborative workspace. This paper proposes a collaborative workspace (Elgar) that supports the Elastic Collaboration concept, and a standard interface to realize the integration of groupware tools, named Elastic Collaboration Components. The paper illustrates the use of such flexible collaborative workspace and the use of groupware tools in a machine diagnosis scenario that requires collaboration.

A Semantic Model for Adaptive Collaboration Support Systems

Dynamic environments characterize today’s world. In complex design and engineering processes, dynamic environments influence the requirements of an ongoing collaboration process. They lead to process goal changes or reduce the time available to achieve a collaborative goal. In such a case, collaboration support and processes need to be adapted. Various collaboration support systems assist groups by providing technological support to structure activities, generate and share data, and to improve group communication. However, current support systems often prescribe or assume a fixed process and a known group composition. As result, collaboration support is needed that considers the changing environment and provides groups with the support they need. Such support can range from a fixed process and tool configuration to an open collaboration environment that enables groups to interact in a self-organized way. This chapter introduces an elastic collaboration approach that comprises a continuum of collaboration support, ranging from prescribed collaboration to new emerging forms of collaboration. The chapter discusses how the concept of elastic collaboration can be implemented in an adaptive collaboration support system using a semantic model to capture, manage and analyze a collaboration environment. Based on this model, a sample application of the semantic model is presented along with a collaborative problem-solving model.

Beyond GSS: fitting collaboration technology to a given work practice

Collaboration has become a critical success factor for many organizations. Collaboration is however not without challenges. Free riding, dominance, group think or hidden agendas are but a few phenomena in group work that make it a non straight effort. In addition, tools and technology that supports collaboration exists in a variety of shapes from complex group support systems (GSS) to simple boxes with cards and pencils. GSS often only offer a limited set of tools with a limited set of configurable features. Organizations, however, face an unlimited variety of problems with an unlimited variety of structures. In this article, we present a component-based groupware approach that goes beyond current GSS and allows collaboration engineers to fit the collaboration technology to a given work practice. We illustrate the feasibility of our approach by reporting on first experiences on supporting a requirements engineering work practice.

Collaboration in Virtual Enterprises through the Smart Vortex Suite

Collaboration is a key issue in modern virtual enterprises adopting service-oriented business models and functional engineering in the offering of their tangible and intangible assets, as in software oriented IT, CAM/CAD, manufacturing industries. In this paper, we aim at introducing the main components of a Collaboration and Decision Making Suite developed for such scenarios, in particular (i) Elgar, a collaborative workspace supporting the elastic collaboration concept, and a standard interface to realize the integration of groupware tools, and (ii) RegalMiner, capable of capturing, monitoring, processing and visualizing collaboration data streams generated from users of Elgar participating a collaborative process that exploits the elastic collaboration approach in order to evaluate individual and group performances by analyzing the generated activities and the produced text contributions.

Evaluating Coordination Support Mechanisms in an Industrial Engineering Scenario

Nowadays, industrial engineering collaboration plays a crucial role along product development life cycle, especially for problem-solving and decision-making processes. This paper evaluates the acceptance of two coordination mechanisms for groups when working on a machine diagnosis report collaboratively. The evaluation is organized as a user study and is based on two hypothesis: groups will prefer unstructured over structured coordination, and groups using structured coordination will accomplish their task more efficiently.

Supporting industrial processes by monitoring and visualizing collaborations

In modern dynamic industrial engineering collaboration contexts, professionals such as the facilitators or meeting coordinators, are required to guide participants before, during and after a collaborative process in order to evaluate individual and group performances and the levels of idea generation, discussion, etc. This paper presents a collaboration support system, REGALMINER, that is able to capture, process, monitor and also visualize metadata from collaboration data streams taking advantage of text mining and information retrieval techniques like sentiment analysis (a.k.a. opinion mining) and keyword extraction. The analysis produces a set of scores that represent various meeting indicators that can be used to monitor and evaluate the dynamics of an ongoing collaborative process and to provide automatic interventions to enhance its effectiveness and efficiency. Information visualization techniques are used to present the results of the analysis to the participants of the current collaborative process or to the meeting coordinator, who supervises the meeting at runtime preventing the occurrence of deviations with respect to the meeting agenda and to make necessary interventions.