E-work: Enabling Distributed Teamworking for New Product Development Activities

The e-business “revolution” has generated many business opportunities. Much for current research and developments initiatives have primarily focused on the development of enabling technology, methods and standards to support buying and/or selling products and services over the Internet. It is now increasingly recognised that the next generation of e-business solutions need to support close, seamless and fluid collaborative work practices between partners within a value chain using the ubiquitous web technology. This has generated a “rush” to porting business operations and enabling technology to the “Internet”. This has led many solution providers to integrating their e-commerce and enterprise groupware solutions to support collaborative work. Based on an on-going research focusing on the support of virtual teamworking in dynamic organisations, this paper presents initial work on action research to understanding the NPD of in-vehicle telematics systems. The paper will present an action research to understand the general characterisation of change and its impact on virtual teamworking in NPD. This will be followed by a brief description of the NPD collaboration issues resulting from the case study findings. Finally the paper will conclude with a proposed e-work support system’s requirements. 1. The Age of Virtual Teamworking It is generally recognised that modern manufacturing organisations need to adapt to the constantly changing business environments, technologies and customer requirements. The opportunities and threats presented by globalisation have increased the requirement of companies to improve their responsiveness to their evermore fragmented and sophisticated customer-base. Over the recent years, many management and technological innovations have been adopted by manufacturing industry including; concurrent engineering and virtual enterprises. Many proponents of virtual enterprise approach have depicts the virtual enterprise as a response to the speed and globalisation Forbairt (1996), Goldman et al. (1995 ) and Skyrme (1996). The 1 A value chain can be defined as an integrated demand and supply chain. 2 A virtual enterprise may be temporarily set up with the objective of making one particular type of product or delivering one particular type of service. When the market for that product or service declines, the virtual enterprise dissolves, its members finding new partners to pursue new opportunities.