Leveraging Knowledge Reuse and System Agility in the Outsourcing Era

Collaborative work groups that span multiple locations and time zones, or “follow the sun,” create a growing demand for creating new technologies and methodologies that enable traditional spatial and temporal separations to be surmounted in an effective and productive manner. The hurdles faced by members of such virtual teams are in three key areas: differences in concepts and terminologies used by the different teams; differences in understanding the problem domain under consideration; and differences in training, knowledge, and skills that exist across the teams. These reasons provide some of the basis for the delineation of new architectural approaches that can normalize knowledge and provide reusable artifacts in a knowledge repository.