This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project addresses weaknesses in currently available groupware, conferencing, and workflow software. These software systems are changing the way organizations function in the l990s, by providing environments for conveniently entering and retrieving information, communicating it among users, and, in the case of workflow software, tracking its flow through business processes. Lacking in these software systems are integral mechanisms for dynamically controlling the collaborative processes they support and for informing users of where and when their contributions are needed. Instead, such control must be collectively supplied by the individual users or be pre-specified in workflow procedures. There is a need for `high-end` collaboration software tools which will have capabilities that are very distinct from today's `mass-market` tools. These high-end tools will provide technologies for handling more complex information exchanges, more opportunistic interactions among participants, and more intelligent control and monitoring of collaborative activities. To address the limitations of current collaboration software systems, It is proposed to apply to human collaboration, the problem-solving approach that was developed to support opportunistic collaboration among software modules. The approach provides a robust core technology for collaboration software -- one that explicitly deals with control separate from the individual problem-solving contributors. This project will demonstrate the effectiveness of applying such an approach for integrating software `experts` in an environment for computer-assisted human collaboration. Controlling the collaboration process will become an increasing burden on users as the use of collaboration tools becomes pervasive. The proposed research addresses this problem head on, by investigating the use of a core technology with explicit control capabilities. As a result, collaboration will become more effective (due to opportunistic control) and less burdensome (due to the reduced control required from individual participants). Given the cross-industry use of collaboration tools, the results of this project have wide commercial applicability.
