A Hypermedia Environment for Global Collaboration

G lobal collaboration on knowledge work, such as product development, is vital in many industries as competition extends across regional borders. Collaborating in such an environment means working between cross-functional, cross-cultural teams separated by time-zone differences and geographical distance. The Internet infrastructure has made global collaboration possible for large numbers of people worldwide, and collaboration tools support many project activities. However, the successful execution of projects still largely depends on personal efforts, such as leadership by " super " designers, late-night (or early-morning) meetings, and expensive time-consuming international travel. To address these problems, we developed an integrated environment to systematically support collaborative knowledge work. The environment consists of InterPOD and TeamSmart. 1 InterPOD supports conferences by providing fuller control over the various media used during a conference. The TeamSmart tool supports document creation by a globally dispersed team through hypermedia. Collaborative knowledge work is inherently difficult. The stakeholders in a project (designers, clients, users, and so on) are typically distributed. Plus, any given project is usually one of several that involve each stakeholder. Global projects thus represent a collaborative process using and creating large amounts of information that must be managed and shared effectively. Our research has focused on ❚ Extending the Web into a true hypermedium to collaboratively create and manage knowledge rather than to merely disseminate information in a one-way manner. ❚ Developing specific applications to support and manage collaborative activities such as face-to-face meetings and distributed document creation. ❚ Implementing an environment to provide multimodal support—including synchro-nous/asynchronous and colocated/dispersed support—to overcome time-zone differences and geographical distance. Problems Time-zone differences and distance create major stumbling blocks in collaborative knowledge work by a globally distributed team. In practice , any significant global project involves face-to-face meetings to exchange information, ideas, and understandings concerning the current project status. Between meetings, team members work on their responsibilities mostly in an asyn-chronous manner. This process of synchronous work (meetings) and asynchronous work is usually repeated until the end of the project. However, face-to-face meetings for global projects are expensive and time consuming because of distance. Also, scheduling remote conferences (such as telephone conferencing) proves difficult because of time-zone differences. Meetings themselves are difficult enough to conduct even when participants are in the same room. Kaiya and Saeki 2 videotaped and analyzed meetings held to discuss the requirements analysis of software systems. They found that a large portion of the discussion failed to …