Abstract
Through emerging technological developments, the human being is increasingly becoming liberated in his or her role as a knowledge worker, becoming able to interact seamlessly with colleagues, resources, and information facilitating improved work processes and new value generation opportunities. In this context, the ability to interact over distance across organizational, geographical, and cultural boundaries, as well as on site, is becoming increasingly important to the overall competitiveness of any organization, as collaborative tools and technologies are rapidly being adopted by both the market and society as soon as they become available. It is evident that the market for more advanced solutions is enormous.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Collaboration: A mutually influencing activity by one or more persons oriented toward common goals and the solution or completion of a problem or task. This takes place within a mutually agreed and created context (common syntactical space, cooperative setting) in physical co-presence using common resources.
Collaboration Assets: The resources required to carry out collaborations (people, process, ICT systems, and knowledge).
Multimodality: Multimodality harmoniously combines the different methods of communication between man and machine.
Ad Hoc Collaboration: Short-term, on demand, spontaneous and task-specific collaboration.
Mediated Collaboration: Medium-term collaborations in which a mediator is employed to facilitate collaboration.
Environment: A collection of hardware, software, network communications and procedures that work together to provide a discrete type of computer service.
Planned Collaboration: Long-term collaborations in which collaborative enterprise processes are planned, defined, and implemented.
Collaborative Working Environments: CWE are defined as integrated and connected resources providing shared access to contents and allowing distributed actors to seamlessly work together towards common goals.
Collaboration Stages: The individual stages of the life-cycle of any given collaboration (initiation, management, operation, and dissolution stages).