Preface
Information is the lifeblood of modern society, its chief
raw material and also its main product. So the world of business as well
as the general public have much to gain from the increased use of information,
from more sophisticated information systems, and from a creative and thorough
redesign of existing information-handling processes. As the pace of change
is growing in any field it is of paramount importance that the enabling
potential of information technology is recognized to its full extent.
Telecooperation is an outstandig example for the power
of enabling technologies. As well, it is the latest appearing manifestation
of those guiding visions and paradigms that have governed application development.
These visions and paradigms have come subsequently into the limelight of
interest. Each of them opened new opportunities, but also maintained connection
to earlier paradigms in order to incorporate existing capabilities as well.
Some important paradigms are given in the following:
- Automation and Integration: Automating of decisions
and integrating data into databases are examples of early guidelines of
development. They governed the application development of the mainframe
decade and have kept on to be significant.
- Document Management: This concept gained vigour from
the fact that in office and administration documents are ubiquitous: recording
policies, standards, and procedures; documenting contracts and agreements;
presenting views of reality in reports and plans; creating images and impressions;
providing mechanisms for communication; acting as vehicle for business
processes; giving help for capturing and articulating concepts and ideas.
- Business Processes: Changing to a dynamic perspective
means shifting the focus from documents to processes. Basic metaphor for
this paradigm is the production chain derived from industrial engineering:
each activity is intrinsically related to preceding and succeeding ones,
so as to make synchronization a major issue. This Tayloristic model is
suitable to the well structured office procedures and is supported by Workflow
Management Systems.
- Collaboration: Oddly enough, it was the widespread
usage of Workflow Management Systems that revealed their intrinsic limitations.
It was realized that coordinated activities are not "the only game in offce"
and collaboration has to be supported as well. This has lead to the development
of Groupware Systems with the round table as metaphor. As a pure type,
Collaboration designates persons working together without any external
previous coordination. It means working together as a group, understanding
the intentions and activities of other members, and sharing information.
Especially, for the higher echelons of management Collaboration is the
prevalent mode of work.
- Management Information: Aim is exploiting the vast
volume of stored data in order to get information for planning and decisions.
Even the basic event of retrieval can become rather complex needing indexing,
categorizing, semantic correspondences, definition of hyper-structures,
fuzzy retrieval, case based search etc. A connection with collaborative
activities are Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS). They are aimed at
the specific situation of taking collective decisions as a group. Many
collective decisions are the result of a complex procedure and provide
many starting points for assistance. GDSS are a good example that Management
Information often is associated with other paradigms. Such associations
might in some way explain the chamaeleonesque character of the paradigm
Management Information. Concepts and labels have changed quite often and
one could mention as examples such established concepts as EIS, DSS, KB-DSS,
GDSS or recent approaches such as Data Mining.
- Organizational Memories: Building up memories for organizations
is an old dream that has gained actuality. Enterprises and agencies invest
more and more in the establishment and maintenance of managing their
intellectual property and accessing the institutions knowledge potential.
The extent where institutional memory is retained seems to be enormous:
individuals, culture, organizational structures and transformations, internal
information repositories, and external archives.
- Telecooperation: Telecooperation is the most recent
paradigm and the focus lies on cooperation in the broader sense. It is
a pronounced holistic vision and it intends to integrate (at least to some
extent) many paradigms mentioned above. Hence, Telecooperation comprises
procedural and collaborative modes of work and is concerned with the managing
of documents and the establishment of organizational memories for organizations.
It is the integrative perspective that enables Telecooperation
to cover the whole fan of work activities within an enterprise. On one
hand it will include common street-level-operations such as settling accounts
in banking from home. On the other hand it means supporting "higher-level"
organizational processes involving decision-making, negotiation, policy-formulation
and planning. All these are marked by high complexity of issues,
sophisticated procedural regulations, conflicting interests of stakeholders
and the involvement of several persons.
It is the central role of work that makes Telecooperation
such a remarkable paradigm. Not alone that work is put in the centre of
consideration, it is also liberated from up to yet inherent spatial limits.
Cooperation in unlimited space produces a global framework as important
accomplishment. This effect is mirrored by a series of notions all illustrating
extending space: Global Office, Telepresence, Teleadministration, etc.
For the later one an illustration is given below.
Teleadministration, for instance, would imply remote access
to administrative services and interaction from the home, from a kiosque,
from a neighbourhood centre or from a public library. Regarding the topics
of civic information systems they will comprise manifold services: general
orientation, referral assistance, information about welfare, civic rights
and duties, material on local affairs, consumer information, everyday information.
Usage will range from quite simple questions (where-to-go) to the participation
in planning processes.
A comment on the design of adequate solutions is to be
added. Teleadministration should ensure comfort and sophistication of communication
- notably by means of interactive multimedia. An appropriate solution has
to include the use of intelligent software as well as the possibility to
have - mediated by multimedia - a "quasi-face-to-face encounter" with a
relevant officer. Bringing the pertinent expert into the dialogue may become
necessary, because the case might include critical problems. Moreover,
such mediated contact can solve issues of communication, interpretation
and comprehension. Much to often such issues will occur considering the
widespread experience that administrative language is not well understood
by ordinary citizens.
Fast growth combined with swift
commercialization are further characteristic traits
of Telecooperation. The impressive growth is incited by sound progress
in many fields: Collaboration, Tools, Methods, Mobile Computing, Web-technology,
etc. It is a sometimes ebullient evolution leading to new products, new
professions, innovative services and new lines of business. In someway,
now, a degree of informatization of society is reached that already had
been addressed twenty years ago in the prominent report of Nora and Minc.
There is an additional reason that this paradigm is so
important. Telecooperation drastically changes the aspects of work for
millions of peoples. It is a core question in all enterprises, how to do
business now that this variety of technical means exists. This issue requires
hard thinking about the ways in which work is carried out and shifts the
interest from technical means to their adequate usage. Full benefits of
technology will only be reaped if work and organizations will be reshaped.
So in the end both, users and organization, will earn substantial profit
from change. Breathtaking prospects of new potentialities have already
appeared on the horizon. The sign posts directing to them bear well-known
labels: Electronic Commerce, Electronic Government, Teleworking and Virtual
Organization.
Hence the proceedings of the conference cover four main
domains.
- Collaboration: This part deals with all the various
efforts aimed at improving "working-together mediated by technology". Goal
is an effective and agreeable interaction that comes close to habitual
and natural ways of communicating and cooperating: the results achieved
will be convivial systems.
- Tools and Design Methods: Working-together in co-located
or geographically dispersed groups needs particular technologies. In a
similar way methods for analysis and design have to be developed that can
cope with the characteristic situation of cooperative work.
- Teleworking and Virtual Organizations: They are different
sides of the organizational goal to use telecooperation technology for
redesigning work. Although such innovations can be regarded as advantageous
per se, they may induce an amount of change to organizations and users
yet far from being managed adequately: striking the balance is a delicate
task.
- Electronic Commerce and Electronic Government: Both
applications have become the main beneficiary of Telecooperation
with progress prompted by the rampant spreading of the Web. And yet significant
questions remain open. They have to be solved in order to achieve the same
degree of reliability, security and entrustment by electronic means as
it is guaranteed in the conventional ways of doing business.
Many people have worked hard to form the conference and
to prepare Program and Proceedings. So notable acknowledgement is owed
to the Chairs and Members of the Program Committee listed below. Special
thanks have to go to the Organising Committee chaired by Maria Tóth
and Walter Grafendorfer and to those persons who have been involved particulary
in the preparation: Wolfgang Hawlik, Gabriela Küng, Lisi Maier-Gabriel
and Eszter Zubovics.
Roland Traunmüller, coeditor
Johannes Kepler University
Linz
Erzsébet Csuhaj-Varjú, coeditor
Hungarian Academy of Science
Budapest
