IBM Systems Journal articles from October 2006

IBM Systems Journal archives from October 2006

Introduction.(Editorial)
October 1, 2006... Collaboration in today's global business environment is being highlighted by management experts and financial analysts as critical to innovation and the creation of new business models. Successful collaborations that were created outside the...

Preface.(Editorial)
October 1, 2006... The focus on innovation in today's business world has increased awareness of the crucial role collaboration plays in the workplace. At the same time, business globalization often leads to the geographical separation of teams within an...

Beyond predictable workflows: enhancing productivity in artful business processes.
October 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION In most companies, managers are under pressure to reduce costs and improve productivity. In this paper, we give a practitioner's perspective on some of the challenges of improving workforce productivity and offer some...

Business activity patterns: a new model for collaborative business applications.
October 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION This paper is a companion to "Activity management as a Web service," which also appears in this issue of the IBM Systems Journal. (1) Accomplishing complex work in businesses requires a great deal of coordination...

Activity management as a Web service.
October 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION This paper is a companion to "Business activity patterns: A new model for collaborative business applications," which also appears in this issue of the IBM Systems Journal. (1) Today's tools provide little support for...

Activity explorer: activity-centric collaboration from research to product.
October 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION Activity Explorer (AE), a part of the IBM Workplace * product family, (1) introduced the concept of activity-centric collaboration to the market. The basic idea behind activity-centric collaboration is simple: Reorganize...

Uncovering the to-dos hidden in your in-box.
October 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION The beginning of the 21st century has been marked by an explosion of electronic information. We often find ourselves inundated with information that reaches us through a variety of channels, including e-mail accounts,...

Ethnographic study of collaborative knowledge work.
October 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION According to Tom Davenport, a knowledge worker is "someone with high degrees of expertise, education or experience and the primary purpose of their jobs involves the creation, distribution, or application of knowledge." (1)...

Following the sun: case studies in global software development.
October 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION Global telecommunications networks have matured in the past decade, providing a vehicle for relatively inexpensive communication between teams that are separated by great physical distances. This new reality provides an...

Machines in the conversation: detecting themes and trends in informal communication streams.
October 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION Since the dawn of spoken language, conversation has been the means by which ideas are developed and a consensus around those ideas obtained. The speed, range, and modes in which conversations can take place have increased...

Communication-minded visualization: a call to action.(Technical Forum)
October 1, 2006... Visualization applications can enable interactions between people in powerful and unexpected ways, as illustrated by the following two personal experiences. In the spring of 2003, the first author created PostHistory, an application to...

Using ontology to support development of software architectures.
October 1, 2006... INTRODUCTION The IEEE Recommended Practices for Architectural Description of Software-Intensive Systems (IEEE-1471) (1) provides a conceptual framework for documenting software architectures, in which the documentation is organized as a...