DICTE PLATFORM: AN INPUT TO COLLABORATION AND KNOWLEDGE SHARING

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1 DICTE PLATFORM: AN INPUT TO COLLABORATION AND KNOWLEDGE SHARING Annalisa Terracina, Stefano Beco ElsagDatamat Spa Via Laurentina, 760, Rome, Italy Adrian Grenham, Iain Le Duc SciSys Ltd Methuen Park - Chippenham, Wiltshire,United Kingdom, SN14 0GB Elisabeth Schoepfer, Luigi Fusco ESA Via Galileo Galilei, Frascati (RM), Italy ABSTRACT Collaboration is primarily a human issue: people need both the opportunity to collaborate, in terms of time, and a reason to do so in terms of being able to benefit from it. While people dealing privately with the Internet are generally very willing to participate in social collaboration and knowledge sharing, within the structured working environment most people do not have the leisure to exchange knowledge and pursue information sharing activities. This is usually due to their time restrictions and the lack of a collaborative culture in the organisation. This is a very important point and supports the view that while the technical infrastructure must make it easy to perform these activities there still needs to be the motivation to do it. The aim of the DICTE study is to pave the way for the practical implementation of a collaboration platform that addresses collaboration from both a cultural and technical perspective. This means that the DICTE platform needs to be user friendly (e.g. adequately performing) and have a well structured interface, so as to induce people to collaborate: this will be achieved, in part, through exploiting the Web2.0 (and beyond) paradigm. KEYWORDS Collaboration, knowledge sharing, collaborative platform, collaborative culture, Web INTRODUCTION The DICTE project has been commissioned by the European Space Agency (ESA) to gain an understanding of collaboration and to pave the way for the implementation of an ESA-wide technical collaboration platform. This platform should support the diffusion of, and access to, ESA achieved knowledge and serve to improve communication across the organization as a whole. It is recognised that part of the ESA mission is to interpret the information needs of European citizens, researchers and industry and to transform those needs into requirements for the space systems that will satisfy them. In this context collaborative environments represent an important opportunity for ESA to take advantage of technologies to improve the cooperation and coordination of the different actors mentioned above. The goal of DICTE is to study the nature of collaboration from both the cultural and technical viewpoints and to propose an architecture as well as a roadmap towards the implementation of the so called One ESA platform. The concept of One ESA, with respect to the DICTE study, is represented by two main threads. On one hand, there is the necessity to share knowledge and tools that are commonly used and available in ESA together with the need to interface with alternative tools and systems used by the industries and research institutes that work with ESA. On the other hand, there is the need to promote the use of tools strictly related to collaboration and that allow organisations to work together easily and accumulate a shared knowledge. 386

2 IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2008 Although commissioned by ESA a specific objective for the DICTE platform is to be as general and flexible as possible to satisfy the needs of any partner organizations for collaboration and knowledge sharing. The consortium that works on DICTE has previous important experience on an analogous issue: THE VOICE project, also funded by ESA focussed on the usage of state of art technologies such as Grid, wireless and mobile communications for collaboration purposes. THE VOICE was concluded in December 2006 while DICTE is still at an early stage of development. In Paragraph 2 this paper presents the generic problem of collaboration and knowledge sharing. The cultural aspect of collaboration is discussed in sub-paragraph 2.1 whereas the technology aspect is discussed in sub-paragraph 2.2. In the last paragraph some preliminary conclusions are drawn (preliminary only now, as the project is still ongoing). 2. COLLABORATION AND KNOWLEDGE SHARING In THE VOICE project, the concept of collaboration was addressed from a very technical point of view. A review was conducted of a set of state-of-the-art technologies that could be used to build up a collaborative platform organised as a set of services (implemented as web services). A layered model was adopted with a sub-set of the services classified as basic and, therefore, common to every application while others were classified as domain-oriented and specific to an application domain. The platform was shown to be very flexible allowing the services to be combined in a number of configurations including the omission of domain specific services in particular configurations. The DICTE study adopts the philosophy developed for the THE VOICE platform characterized by an open, web services and standards based approach, and proceeds to bring it up to date with current developments and paradigms. In addition, particular attention is drawn to the culture of collaboration that completes the vision at 360 degrees. In the initial phase of the DICTE study a user requirements survey of the ESA staff and stakeholders needs was performed. To facilitate the survey and to make our objective clear, a definition of Virtual Community was given to the interviewed people. One objective was to assess the relative importance of a range of collaborative activities based on the use of common tools and the definition of tools that enable and encourage collaboration. Four main areas of collaboration and knowledge sharing were distinguished and characterized: Personal communications (meetings, conferencing, , chat, VOIP, etc.) Knowledge management (blogs, wikis, e-learning, etc.) Information exchange (results, parameters, processed images, data, etc.) Project/process management (business models, project meetings, etc.) Figure 1. ESA Virtual Community Obviously, depending on the Virtual Community, certain tools are considered more useful while other less. In the survey which was conducted the distribution of interest are summarized in Figure 1. The figure illustrates the Virtual Community divided in four segments according to the areas of interest described above. 387

3 Each of them contains a set of tools and the geometric shape indicates the interest (crucial, important, non influential) as indicated by the ESA community. The general approach described so far should be translated in a concrete platform. For this reason in the following paragraphs we provide an overview of the two main issues: cultural and technological. 2.1 Culture of Collaboration The ant is a collectively intelligent and individually stupid animal; man is the opposite said Karl Von Frisck who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology in This quote stresses a very important point: human collaboration is weak. This is true for big and small organisations and it is therefore essential to find a way to emphasise its importance and to encourage the culture of collaboration. In an organisation, collaboration means combining all the tools, methods and processes that enable connection and cooperation among individual intelligences in order to achieve a common objective, accomplish a mission or complete a task. From this viewpoint it is worth noting that a collaborative platform is like a marketplace where information and knowledge can be exchanged and further, that a collaboration platform can be useful only if the culture of collaboration is largely diffused. Figure 2. shows a process in which everyone can support the efficient functioning of a collaboration platform just simply performing three actions: contributing, taking, evaluating. Collaboration as a human interaction requires an investment by the participants in much the same way as any other relationship. Therefore, building and maintaining collaborative partnerships requires the willingness to spend the time on all sides that cannot be replaced by any technical environment or collaborative platform. Thus true collaboration needs an element of sharing and a long term relationship typified by working together rather than merely working alongside or of simple co-operation. Figure 2. Information market place. The basic actions, described in Figure 2, guarantee that everyone is part of the process and that everyone contributes to the creation and sharing of knowledge. At the same time everyone can take advantage of it just by picking up the contribution available. The action of evaluation insures that the information in the market place is correct and useful. Participation in a successful collaboration environment will inevitably generate benefits. DICTE has identified two classes of benefits: benefits to the organization that arise simply from collaborating and benefits that may be realized from the implementation of so called collaborative tools and technologies. It is important to understand that while technologies can often improve collaboration, if the culture is lacking, they will not result in collaboration. Hereafter is a short list of some of the benefits of collaboration per se: Accelerated and improved decision making process Encourages team cohesion Reducing staff turnover Encourages collective responsibility Process improvement (reducing inefficiencies or eliminating process steps) Being able to exert influence for the benefit of the collaboration Improved knowledge sharing Access and Availability of expertise and experience Reduced travel & less time spent in organising attending meetings 388

4 IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2008 Better searching / more accurate results Immediate communications Access to information anywhere In addition to the statements given above, we believe that the culture of collaboration cannot grow spontaneously in a structured organization. Once a suitable culture has been created and the benefits of collaboration are understood, employees will be willing to share ideas and knowledge with colleagues and will not consider time spent in sharing experience as wasted time. However, if an organisation truly considers collaboration as important it should consider adopting a system of encouragement and evaluating employee performance based on their ability to cooperate. Indeed, it is very important that collaboration becomes an ethical issue of the organisation and that employees are well aware of this. Collaboration should become a new individual performance criterion so that people can no longer consider it a waste of time but instead one of the tasks that they should accomplish. 2.2 Technologies behind DICTE As suggested in paragraph 2.1, the DICTE platform will be influenced by the insights and experience gained during THE VOICE project. The study will also take into account recent developments and trends in collaborative technologies and Web2.0 in particular. In general, the term Web2.0 is used to indicate the trend of using the Internet in a much more interactive way than has previously been possible. It has revealed a widespread appetite for large scale syndication of information and vastly increased interaction and communication between users involving a level of participation not achievable in the previous standard web based applications. From a technical point of view Web2.0 has also shown the popularity of using simple protocols and open standards aimed at data syndication (rather than concentrating primarily on service coordination) allowing easy re-use and reconfiguration of data to generate new services. Recognised benefits from Web2.0 include: access to the long tail (applications aimed at realising income from the huge number of small value users rather then relying on a few large value clients) harnessing the intelligence of the crowd enabling new s/w lifecycle (continuous Beta) better dissemination of info improved communications involving the consumer delivering focussed products context sensitive searching based on user preferences and past behaviour Leveraging folksonomies to contextualise information searching, rich applications DICTE will take into account these new paradigms in the approach to the design of a technical platform that will offer an increased level of interactivity while retaining access to the tools considered crucial from the user requirements (see Figure 1). The unique contribution of DICTE is to review the currently available collaboration technologies from the perspective of the culture of collaboration, that is, how best to exploit the benefits of collaboration. It would appear that this can be best achieved through the management of collective intelligence which is not well served by existing tools that tend to isolate information and concentrate on simple communication solutions. The issue is to locate, manage, access and share knowledge that is not contained in a single source but is representative as the result of multiple human interactions. DICTE has identified a set of key technologies areas that are generally weak and not well integrated into existing collaborative platforms. Enterprise Search (all of "what", "who" and "where") Application interoperability Knowledge Management Content Management Semantic interoperability While each of these areas is individually the subject of continuing research, collaboration in its most general sense requires a seamless combination of all of them. A general principal of DICTE is not to cause unnecessary changes to established working practices and to integrate, as far as possible, existing and familiar tools and technologies. A major goal, therefore, is to design 389

5 the platform in a way that different components coming from the market can interoperate; as a consequence the consideration of the middleware permitting a plug and play approach plays a key role. DICTE will provide an architecture that enables the use of different tool for the same service and thus it will not force the user to use a particular one. 3. CONCLUSION Collaboration is principally about communication and may be seen to rest on 4 pillars: People, Culture, Information, and Infrastructure. Insufficient consideration of any of these aspects will inhibit collaboration within an organisation. However, the benefits of collaboration are also contingent upon the active combination of these elements. Hence, the technologies used to support collaboration must provide the means to encourage the free exchange of ideas and information by making it easy to contribute and benefit from the collective intelligence. As an example of complex human activity, collaboration within an organisation relies on the right culture supported with the right technologies. A review of existing tools has revealed that interoperability between applications and data is generally missing together with the ability to manage information across heterogeneous repositories. Also content management and semantic interoperability is not well developed making it difficult to manipulate information (data with meaning or context) within a collaborative framework. The DICTE study has a very ambitious goal: it aims to design the architecture of a technical collaboration platform that fulfils the ESA vision of One ESA. In order to achieve this, DICTE exploits the results of THE VOICE study and proceeds to address two further fundamental aspects of collaboration, particularly in a structured organization, that are the culture of collaboration and the Web2.0 paradigm. In addition the study has determined that the collaborative platform must not dictate working practices or prescribe the use of certain technologies. We contend that the DICTE study has several points of strength. It faces the collaboration problem from IT and cultural aspects and particular relevance is given to knowledge management that is considered one of the main issues that can help knowledge capitalization. The best practice off the shelf tools available will be used and the DICTE effort will be focused on the middleware and glue software in order to foster interoperability. The DICTE study has already passed two important phases: User Requirement Retrieval and Benefit Survey and Mapping. Two further phases are to come: Strategic Development Plan Definition and Initial Architecture and Prototype Definition. The study will end in April 2009 and it will provide the architecture for the proposed collaborative platform plus a prototype as proof of concept. We believe that DICTE platform will be flexible and generic enough to satisfy the exigencies of other structured organizations. REFERENCES Book Olivier Zara, 2004, Managing Collective Intelligence, Toward a New Corporate Governance, M21 Editions, Paris, France Evan Rosen, 2007, The Culture of Collaboration: Maximizing Time, Talent and Tools to Create Value in the Global Economy, Red Ape Publishing, US Public document Frost, Sullivan, 2007, Measuring the true business benefits of web collaboration, white paper sponsored by Webex Mehandjiev N., Stokic D.,2006, Future and Emerging Technologies and Paradigms for Collaborative Working Environment, DG Information Society, European Commission Beco et al., 2006, THE VOICE Executive Summary. Available at Beco et al., 2005, "ecollaboration in working environments: approach and views for the future", Brussels, Belgium. Available at 390