New Ways of Flexible Working: The Contribution of ACTS, and Issues for IST

This chapter is a programme-level overview of the contribution of ACTS to new ways of flexible working, and highlights some of the technological issues that need to be addressed by the IST programme. The task of the ACTSLINE project is to summarise the results of ACTS in a form meaningful to communications professionals in various business sectors external to ACTS. For further information on summarised ACTS results relating to flexible working, please see the ACTSLINE website—Flexible Working sector [1]. The mission of the DIFFERENCE project is to facilitate the cohesion of different architectures in the area of Intelligence in Services and Networks [2]. Details of all individual ACTS projects can be found on the InfoWin / InfoBridge website [3]. The present chapter firstly takes a brief look at the vision: what is meant by “new ways of flexible working”, and why Europeans should be interested. It then categorises ACTS projects and guidelines according to a layered model of communications. The following sections summarise the ACTS contribution. The final section highlights some issues that remain to be solved in the timeframe of the IST Programme.