Supporting Globally Distributed Work - Cultural Adaptivity Meets Groupware Tailorability

摘要

Computer Supported Cooperation has developed into a quite mature technology over time. Key factors such as awareness and synchronization between cooperating partners and work bench are widely solved. For application in real live, some tools are available, some in use, but the general breakthrough did not happen. Well known “Globalization” is a field where CSCW and similar tools can bring major contribution – but also new challenges have to be faced as user groups, or teams, will encounter more and more people from different nationalities and cultural background. Therefore, adaptation is needed beyond social behavior where culture becomes a key factor and resulting flexibility of CSCW-tools becomes a must. As a respond to this demand, Tailor-SMaDe (Tailorable Software Modeling and Design) has been developed as web-based synchronous groupware tool that supports globally distributed work. The tool provides high flexibility by allowing users to tailor their collaboration environment. It is implemented as a web-based application, which adds to the advantage that users need only to use their web-browsers to access the application. Tailor-SMaDe is built modularly so as to ease future extension of the groupware. Tailor-SMaDe is intended to be equipped with a culturally-aware expert system that suggests the most optimal configuration of a collaboration environment.