No. 1079
Survey on CSCW System Technology for 21st Century-Type Organization
Investigating R&D Committee on
"Survey on CSCW System Technology for 21st Century-Type Organization"

Recent prevailing network technologies are changing the way of the organizations and the our daily working styles.  Investigating R&D Committee on “Survey on CSCW System Technology for 21st Century-Type Organization” was established in April 2004 to study the future possibility of network-supported work styles of 21st society and their supporting technologies. We surveyed the “theories of organizations”, “grid computing”, “semantic web”, and made the following trend and needs clear.

(1)  Changes in Industries, Organizations:  Technologies and the changes in the ways of thinking make the boundary of organizations vague and urge their reconstructions. The main trends are small organizations, on-demand project style organizations, e-Lancing, distributed decision making, empowerment, organization by motivation, not work position, etc.  To support the changes, we need the development of information sharing technology, especially, management technology of implicit knowledge.  We also need ‘so-called meta’ technology of innovation, such as utilization of large database of business processes for the organizational and/or business innovation.

(2)  Information Technologies: Several middleware have been developed to utilize the grid computing and semantic web. However, further, we need to develop the technologies for informal collaboration of people and sharing implicit knowledge.

In this report, first, we look back the history of CSCW and describe the achievement with respect to “Theory of organization”, “Grid computing”, “Letter from Korea”, “Future Directions”.


©2007. The Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan