Creating a Value Proposition for Collaborative Engineering Systems within an Application Service Provider Model

Globalization has spawned an increasing number of geographically dispersed teams, the success of which is dictated by the ability to effectively communicate and share information. Meanwhile, the rapidly changing Internet economy places unparalleled importance on faster time-to-market development cycles for products and services. Providing organizations with new ways to improve communications, collaborative engineering systems increase productivity, while reducing project costs and duration. The ability to allow employees to share information across organizational boundaries is a significant step in producing effective teams. Additionally, information sharing between collaborative teams may be ideally supported by an application service provider (ASP) model. ASPs provide common information and centralized application services for collaborative engineering systems. The objective of this investigation is to create business value for collaborative engineering systems. Bringing business value through strategic, organizational, and technological issues, collaborative engineering systems may spread across educational, financial, industrial, as well as business sectors. Businesses must perform strategic, organizational, and technological analysis to achieve successful distributed collaboration. A business plan, featuring a marketing report and an abstraction of a collaborative engineering system, will highlight the thesis. The business plan will also reveal the business model and strategies of the company ieCollab (intelligent electronic collaboration) Partners, a team of graduate engineers in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Thesis Supervisor: Feniosky Pena-Mora Title: Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering