PARADIGM SHIFT IN INTER-ORGANISATIONAL
COLLABORATION
A Framework for Web based Dynamic eCollaboration
Ioakim (Makis) Marmaridis and Athula Ginige
AeIMS Research Group, University of Western Sydney, Sydney, Australia
Keywords:
Dynamic eCollaboration, World Wide Web, Collaboration Paradigm Shift, Bitlet, Workflow Engine, P2P.
Abstract:
The proliferation of the World Wide Web (web) offers new ways for organisations to do business and collabo-
rate with others to gain competitive advantage. Dynamic eCollaboration has the characteristics to keep up with
the fast changing business landscape. It requires however a framework for collaboration that can also keep
up with rapid change. In this paper we present the Dynamic eCollaboration model that brings the concepts
of P2P collaboration to organisations. It fills this gap and offers a new avenue for organisations of all sizes
to embrace collaboration and benefit from it. We also present our technology framework built to support Dy-
namic eCollaboration. The framework is component-based and extensible with an architecture that can scale.
It incorporates a flexible security subsystem, a lightweight workflow engine optimised for web applications
and a novel method for bundling and sharing web based information called Bitlet.
1 INTRODUCTION
Business collaboration as a means to gaining compet-
itive advantage is well established (Lee, 2004) and the
area of collaboration in general receives a lot of atten-
tion from researchers. From collaboration between
individuals (Cap, 2003; David et al., 2005; Scott et al.,
1997) to group collaboration (Mandviwalla and Olf-
man, 1994; Dus, 2004; Sun, 2003; Thomas, 1997;
Mark et al., 1996) and collaboration for enterprises
making their resources accessible to select partners
and business associates (Cha, 2004; Sybase, ; Aissi
and Chan, 2003; Donnan, 2002) a lot of systems have
been developed to support it. Some have started off
as research platforms (Arb, 2002; Egi, 2004) subse-
quently either turning commercial or remaining free
and open source and others, particularly targeting en-
terprise collaboration, come from very well known
vendors. Oracle (:20, 2003), Novell (Novell, ), IBM
and Microsoft are just few of the large vendors that
have delved into providing solutions for collabora-
tion of some form. While the quality and feature
set of these solutions vary greatly, some of these of-
fer a host of features and abilities to the organisa-
tions who can put them in place. Although the col-
laboration space is full with solutions for most types
of collaboration, the authors have observed the lack
of viable solutions for electronic collaboration be-
tween small and medium organisations (SMEs) al-
though they could benefit greatly from adopting those.
The reason is that all existing business collabora-
tion solutions follow the same paradigm that does not
work well in the SME space. The authors advocate a
paradigm shift in the way inter-organisational collab-
oration happens. We strongly believe that Dynamic
eCollaboration (Marmaridis et al., 2004) that models
this new paradigm can offer tangible benefits to SMEs
and other larger organisations. We also firmly be-
lieve that Dynamic eCollaboration can be practically
facilitated via a web-based framework. This paper
presents the new paradigm the authors advocate for
inter-organisational collaboration and the framework
that can support it.
178
(Makis) Marmaridis I. and Ginige A. (2007).
PARADIGM SHIFT IN INTER-ORGANISATIONAL COLLABORATION - A Framework for Web based Dynamic eCollaboration.
In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Software and Data Technologies - Volume ISDM/WsEHST/DC, pages 178-185
DOI: 10.5220/0001335501780185
Copyright
c
SciTePress
2 MOTIVATION FOR THIS
WORK
We have been researching electronic collaboration
for over four years aiming to understand why SMEs
are not adopting electronic collaboration using the
web. In the wider context look we look for the op-
timum way to perform and facilitate web based inter-
organisational collaboration. We view the web as a
mature platform for cheap, secure communication and
therefore an enabler for collaboration (Marmaridis
et al., 2004). During this time we have surveyed the
landscape of collaboration tools and methods from in-
ter personal to enterprise-level collaboration. There
are many tools from many vendors, some represent-
ing excellent use of technology with impressive fea-
ture sets however they still all fail to appeal to the
SMEs, who hold the middle ground in the collabora-
tion landscape. We therefore started looking beyond
technology solutions and saw that a paradigm shift is
necessary in the way collaboration takes place. There
must be more choice offered to individuals within
an organisation when it comes to collaborating, and
at the same time organisations must know they have
control over the information they share with others.
A policy-driven, completely top down approach leads
to micro-management and does not work in the long-
run, on the other hand a bottom-up approach that al-
lows individuals to freely share information without
maintaining control does not work either. Through
interacting with SMEs that wish to collaborate we de-
rived the desirable characteristics of such an engage-
ment and we also took into account the particular cir-
cumstances of SMEs that include lack of IT expertise
and lack of large infrastructure investment for col-
laboration. A detailed analysis of these characteris-
tics in the context of SMEs can be found in some of
our previous work (Marmaridis and Unhelkar, 2005).
To fulfil these requirements we therefore derived an
evolved model of electronic collaboration called Dy-
namic eCollaboration (Marmaridis et al., 2004). We
define Dynamic eCollaboration as flexible, electronic
collaboration based on short to medium term projects
where business partners have ephimeral relationships
and are able to opt-in and out from each project at
any time. Wishing to see Dynamic eCollaboration be
adopted in the real world, we went on to design the
key infrastructure components necessary to support
the nearly ad-hoc, dynamic nature of collaboration.
This paper presents this framework in detail because
we believe that Dynamic eCollaboration and its as-
sociated paradigm shift has many benefits to offer to
organisations of all sizes not only SMEs.
3 CONTEMPORARY
COLLABORATION
PARADIGMS
There are three major types of collaboration one
can find via academic literature or by observation
amongst people and organisations. Collaboration
between individuals on one to one basis, group
based collaboration and enterprise-level collabora-
tion. These three types differ significantly in the fol-
lowing aspects:
Trust Different trust levels are necessary to establish
and maintain each type of collaboration. Individ-
uals require little trust up front, groups more and
enterprises the most.
Risk Inter-personal collaboration has the least which
explains why instant messaging networks are in
such high use. Group collaboration involves more
risk as it requires more commitment and resources
to setup and get going in the first place. Enteprise-
level collaboration has the most amount of per-
ceived risk as decision-making may be critical de-
pending on the type of collaboration.
Amount of information exposure Similarly to the
previous factors, individuals in an IRC channel
can disguise their own identity rather effectively,
in groups it is harder to do so and also more in-
formation is exchanged. Finally at the enterprise
level company secrets may be disclosed by acci-
dent or otherwise and information may be very
damaging if it reaches competitors by any chance.
Amount of control Individuals are content with be-
ing able to interrupt the communication as soon
as they like. They can stop responding to emails
or instant messages, they can remove a web
page with information that they have put online.
Groups have little control over what is shared, by
whom and for what purpose, this is sometimes ad-
vantageous and other times it is not. Organisa-
tions feel the need to exercise a lot of control be-
cause of the critical nature of some collaborations
and the sensitivity of the information exchanged.
Collaboration Direction Bottom-up for individuals
and groups, with people taking initiative to con-
tribute or not, comment and provide feedback or
otherwise. Top-down, policy driven, with steps
to police access, and log activities, these are the
characteristics of enterprise-level collaboration.
In inter-personal and group collaboration every-
one participating is able to contribute equally and to
a large extent they are expected to. In enterprise-
collaboration, participants are typically in two groups,
PARADIGM SHIFT IN INTER-ORGANISATIONAL COLLABORATION - A Framework for Web based Dynamic
eCollaboration
179
internal staff and external partners or associates. Staff
are the people who put up information and contribute
the bulk of it with external partners mostly consuming
information and contributing either simple documents
or comments and ideas. This is justified since giving
partners access to internal systems via an extranet can
be a very complex undertaking in order to safeguard
security giving rise to issues of identity management,
single sign-on, policy based access control to differ-
ent internal applications and still involving large risk
in letting outsiders access your own internal systems.
In inter-personal and group collaboration on the other
hand, there is usually no need for cross-authentication
or identity management, as this is a bottom-up ap-
proach.
3.1 Problems with Contemporary
Collaboration Paradigms
For business collaboration a bottom-up approach is
too informal, it does not offer any guarantees that in-
formation leaks can be detected and contained in a
timely manner. On the other hand, the top-down ap-
proach may be workable to an extent for large en-
terprises when they deal with a few well established
business partners and where an army of IT experts is
available to configure and maintain “enterprise grade”
collaboration systems. Everyone else in between in-
cluding SMEs is not really catered for by these two
ways of performing electronic collaboration. SMEs
for instance require some level of inter-organisational
trust to be in place before they engage in collabora-
tion, on the other hand they cannot afford the top-
down rigour enterprises try to exercise due to cost
and time constraints. On the other hand, they need
the flexibility of letting their staff take decisions about
what is shared in the context of each collaboration and
also allow their partners an equal footing to also share
just as freely their own resources. Finally, they can
benefit greatly by allowing access to web applications
they are running internally and at the same time they
cannot afford the price and complexity of systems that
can give them federated identity management and sin-
gle sign-on like enterprises use and battle with.
4 THE NEW AND EMERGING
PARADIGM OF DYNAMIC
ECOLLABORATION
The requirements SMEs and other organisations have
from eCollaboration are not catered for by the current
paradigm enterprises use to share some of their re-
sources with others. When you think about it it is al-
most as if SMEs are like individuals in the amount of
flexibility they require. Yet again they want to main-
tain some high level of control over the entire process
that can in turn mitigate the risk of critical informa-
tion being exposed.
This is where the paradigm shift is necessary to al-
low the flexibility and ad-hoc nature of inter personal
collaboration in a business setting. Dynamic eCollab-
oration can give rise to this paradigm by working at
three levels. Firstly, it sets up a context for the over-
all collaboration between two or more organisations
requiring them to reach an in-principal agreement to
collaborate. Secondly, it maps each actual engage-
ment into a project that is used to keep related ac-
tivities together and also simplify the interactions for
staff that is involved in each project. Finally, in the
context of a project it allows freedom to the members
of the project team to contribute and share resources
and interact with one another. The degree of freedom
is configurable on a per-project basis and although
high by default it can be turned down as needed. Also
all the information shared is trackable and sharing can
be revoked at any time at the project or the whole or-
ganisation level.
Figure 1 below shows graphically how Dynamic
eCollaboration would be represented on the same
landscape as the other types, inter-personal, group and
enterprise-level collaboration.
People-Driven
Company-Driven
Only staff can contribute resources
(partner interaction is limited)
Everyone can contribute
resources
Inter-personal
Collaboration
Dynamic
eCollaboration
Enterprise-level
Collaboration
Figure 1: Dynamic eCollaboration in the Landscape.
Dynamic eCollaboration fits in-between the other
two approaches and allows everyone in a project to
contribute resources while at the same time activities
are user driven (in the context of overall approval by
the business owners of the respective organisations).
Dynamic eCollaboration is able to do this by intro-
ducing a number of key concepts as follows: An up-
front inter-organisational agreement mapping the ini-
tial trust between each partner and providing an um-
brella for each collaborative project. Mapping of col-
laborative activities into projects in order to reduce
complexity and provide better management overall.
ICSOFT 2007 - International Conference on Software and Data Technologies
180
The introduction of Virtual Teams that work on each
project and whose members come from all collabo-
rating partners and have the ability to contribute and
use available resources. A novel mechanism for shar-
ing web accessible resources including applications
in a controlled and flexible way. Finally, a method for
sharing business processes between partners via map-
ping them onto executable workflow definitions.
5 THE DYNAMIC
ECOLLABORATION
CONCEPTUAL MODEL
At its core, Dynamic eCollaboration involves staff
members from one or more organisations working
together and sharing information and business pro-
cesses. The information sharing may take place via
a given application or through a series of applications
and document exchanges. Likewise, the business pro-
cess sharing may follow a prescribed format, it may
be semi-structure or completely ad-hoc. Figure 2 vi-
sualises Dynamic eCollaboration in action. We will
use this figure to explain the different parts of the con-
ceptual model in detail below.
Figure 2: Conceptual Model of Dynamic eCollaboration -
Users in a Virtual Team make resources from their organi-
sations accessible.
5.1 Inter Organisational Trust in
Dynamic Ecollaboration
The model takes into account the importance of Trust
in Dynamic eCollaboration and therefore has a built-
in requirement for up front inter-organisational Trust
between the parties that will be collaborating. Be-
fore any work can take place, a once-off trust must
be established and it has to be kept current and in
place in order for other work to happen between staff
in the partner organisations. Establishing this Trust
requires that there is in-principle agreement between
key stockholders in each partner organisation that
they are willing to join forces and work with one an-
other.
This step also has two more desirable effects that
assist in Trust building and lower the perceived risks
of organisations taking part in collaboration. The two
effects are as follows:
Unanimous acceptance of new entrants required.
Where there is an established collaboration un-
derway, a new partner can only be introduced
if all others agree to establish this high level of
inter-organisational Trust with them. Effectively
this prohibits one partner from bringing in another
organisation they may feel favourably towards
without the consent of all others participants
and therefore increase the risk of information
exposure for those other partners.
All sharing depends on Inter-organisational Trust.
Trust plays a large part in the amount of col-
laboration an organisation is willing to enter to
and the degree of information sharing they are
willing to allow. Therefore, having ultimate
control over what information is shared across all
collaborative engagements allows organisations
to be less sceptical about embarking on Dynamic
eCollaboration. In more traditional forms of
collaboration there may be some upfront require-
ments for establishing who the collaborative
partners are however there is no easy way to
stop each and every interaction with a particular
business partner easily.
When it comes to entering into Dynamic eCollab-
oration the conceptual model offers a set of five steps
as shown in figure 3 that organisation can follow.
Figure 3: Dynamic eCollaboration requires inter-
organisational trust to be in place before any joint work can
take place.
If for instance there are two organisations that
wish to collaborate and they have never had a chance
to work with one another before, in step A their stake-
holders would come together and have an in-principle
agreement about collaborating. This agreement may
have some legal binding effect but more importantly
PARADIGM SHIFT IN INTER-ORGANISATIONAL COLLABORATION - A Framework for Web based Dynamic
eCollaboration
181
it must be codified in the respective platforms for col-
laboration that each organisation has access to and
is going to be using in order to participate in Dy-
namic eCollaboration. This offers blanket protection
for both organisations as a risk mitigation measure. It
is revokable by either one and should that happen, as
in step E in figure 3 any current collaborative activ-
ities will come to an immediate stop, including any
data shared.
Once the inter-organisational Trust in place, the
two organisations can start working on joint projects
that are established, managed and terminated on their
own as long as the umbrella Trust is in place. At each
step in the lifecycle of each project the following ac-
tivities take place:
Project Initiation (shown as stage B in figure 3)
During the project initiation, one of the col-
laborating parties creates a new project with a
description and makes it available to select other
parties. All then can accept to be part of the
project or not and further they can designate
which of their staff members will be part of
the Virtual Team associated with this particular
project.
Performing actual tasks (stage C in figure 3) As
the Virtual Team has been assembled for this
project, its members are now able to start sharing
resources they have access to with others in the
Virtual Team. These resources could be in the
form of applications or data - more on resource
sharing follows later in this chapter. During the
course of the collaborative project additional
collaboration support tools may be required and
used including wikis, threaded discussion forums,
instant messaging and voice chat software. The
Project and its associated Virtual Team exist
for as long as the high level inter-organisational
agreement to collaborate is in place and should
that be revoked all projects and information
sharing is then stopped.
Project Termination (stage D in figure 3) The
project will be terminated once completed or
by mutual agreement to do so earlier. The
termination of this particular project does not
have any flow-on effects onto other projects that
may be currently in progress between those same
or different organisations.
Overall, knowing that there is the ability to safely
pull out of a project or the entire collaboration at
any time is available, in my experience can act as a
catalyst for organisations interested in collaborating.
Such knowledge leads to a lower trust threshold to be
required for getting into collaborative work with other
organisations, therefore encouraging participation.
5.2 Projects in Dynamic Ecollaboration
The conceptual model of Dynamic eCollaboration de-
fines projects as the unit of management for collabo-
rative activities. Each time an organisation decides to
start on a new piece of collaborative work with others
a new project is created to accommodate this.
Therefore projects act as containers of related in-
formation for each engagement and contain refer-
ences to individual users, information about roles
these users may have, ad-hoc groups that they may
be part of in the context of this project and always
contain the Virtual Team which is a special type of
group with all the individuals assigned to the projects
as its members. Finally, a project can contain other
pieces of arbitrary data such as pointers to resources,
access control directives and workflow definitions and
instances that map to business processes. Figure 4
shows the constituents of a typical Dynamic eCollab-
oration project.
Virtual Team
Groups
Roles
Individuals
(people)
Capabilities
Other data
(e.g. workflows)
Figure 4: In Dynamic eCollaboration each project acts as a
container for the Virtual Team and associated data.
ICSOFT 2007 - International Conference on Software and Data Technologies
182
5.2.1 The Relationship between Projects and
Applications
Many other collaborative systems such as Groove (Jr.
et al., 2002) and productivity applications already im-
plement the concept of using projects to segregate in-
formation. Unlike other systems however, projects
under Dynamic eCollaboration are not subordinate to
applications. On the contrary the conceptual model
defines projects as entities that may incorporate one or
more different applications (or parts of applications)
at the same time as resources. This single character-
istic of the conceptual model of Dynamic eCollabo-
ration offers large amounts of flexibility in real life
implementations of Dynamic eCollaboration. For in-
stance a project may be established that requires peo-
ple to share existing documents, discuss particular is-
sues using a threaded discussion forum and co-author
new documents via a wiki. The conceptual model al-
lows them to do all that by defining a single project
where each participant has a single identity that is
linked to the project. From then on, no additional
overheads are necessary in order to manage access
to the different applications or parts of those appli-
cations. And finally when the project comes to an
end and the Virtual Team is dissolved there are no
left-overs that have to be managed in the different ap-
plications individually. This behaviour of the model
enhances maintainability of each project and reduces
the time and effort required to manage it by reducing
the amount of relationships that must be established
and tracked.
Additionally, because projects can transcend ap-
plications and they can incorporate any number of re-
sources and users from one or more organisations at
the same time, they allow overlay business processes
to be set-up fast. All users within a project are ad-
dressable without any concerns of their origin.
5.3 Virtual Teams in Dynamic
Ecollaboration
The concept of a Virtual Team in Dynamic eCollab-
oration abstracts away the true location of members
and provides a single, unified, consistent view of the
people who are actually participating in each collab-
orative project. Also the Virtual Team is a key con-
struct to providing access control for the different re-
sources within each project and can simplify the ex-
pression of access control directives. If for instance a
new project requires that all of its members have ac-
cess to a given wiki page instead of granting access
rights to each individual the same can be achieved by
granting rights to the Virtual Team since by definition
it contains every person associated with the project.
Figure 5 shows a view of how people within a
project may be organised for the purposes of access
control and collaboration in general.
Virtual Team
Project
User with Role
Group of Users
Figure 5: A Typical Virtual Team in a Dynamic eCollabo-
ration Project.
By definition, each person that belongs into a
project must also be a member of the Virtual Team,
however they need not necessarily have any other
roles or group memberships. Having a role does not
exclude people from also being part of groups within
the Virtual Team. Any one person within a Virtual
Team may be member in one or more groups at the
same time and they may have one or more roles also
at the same time. In addition, a role may be given
to only one person at a time. There is no limit to
the number of users a group may contain. Role and
group names must be unique within the context of a
given project but need not be unique across projects.
By design and to limit unecessary complexity, no two
people in the same project may have the same role.
If this is desired, a group can be created instead. No
groups within groups are allowed, as it would have
raised the overall complexity of the model both con-
ceptually and at the implementation level.
Another key characteristic of Dynamic eCollabo-
ration is the speed of change in configuring projects,
teams and access control within those. It is neces-
sary that resources can be added in projects and that
they can be managed with minimum overheads. To
facilitate speed and lower overheads, business users
must be able to configure how collaborative activities
take place. The access control system in the concep-
tual model for Dynamic eCollaboration takes this into
account and provides for fast, simpler sharing by in-
corporating one more important rule. Unless speci-
fied otherwise, anyone within a project is able to con-
tribute resources provided that:
PARADIGM SHIFT IN INTER-ORGANISATIONAL COLLABORATION - A Framework for Web based Dynamic
eCollaboration
183
1. They themselves have access to this resource they
wish to contribute already.
2. They can only grant access rights for this resource
up and including their own level of access for it.
These simple rules along with the ability to seg-
ment access control by project and tie access control
directives to individual users, roles, groups or the Vir-
tual Team as a whole provide flexibility, granularity
and simplicity in managing access control in collabo-
rative projects.
5.4 Sharing of Information and
Resources
Information sharing between users is the cornerstone
of collaboration. In Dynamic eCollaboration re-
sources can be of many types including documents,
single web pages, web applications or parts thereof.
Each resource is captured as a Bitlet which is a self
standing bundle of information that can be easily
shared with others in a project. Bitlets can be static
or interactive and allow in the latter case for instance
the recipient to fill in and post back any HTML forms
that they may contain. Details about Bitlets, their de-
sign and technical implementation can be found in our
previously published work (Marmaridis and Ginige,
2006).
5.5 Sharing of Business Processes
Collaboration involves the joint work of a number of
users via information sharing that can be structured
and fully pre-specified, semi structured or completely
unstructured. Figure 6 shows the spectrum of in-
teractions that can take place within a collaboration
project.
Figure 6: Collaborative interactions classification based on
degree of structure.
In our experience actual collaborative projects in-
volve a mixture of interactions that is somewhere in
between the two extremes. In the context of Dy-
namic eCollaboration, it is not practical to try and
pre-specify each and every interaction and then rely
on a workflow engine to enact the necessary sequence
of events. On the other hand, fully ad-hoc collabo-
ration may be useful at an inter-personal level how-
ever it is not always well suited for business collab-
oration. This is mainly because ad-hoc interactions
are not typically tracked and controlled. In a business
setting having the ability to revoke previously taken
actions or recall shared resources for amendment or
just to pull them out of circulation is a desirable prop-
erty.
Unlike inter-personal collaboration, in business
collaboration it is often necessary to enact business
processes that transcend organisational boundaries.
To facilitate this, the Dynamic eCollaboration model
makes provision for a workflow engine for executing
the different business processes. Unfortunately due
to lack of space we cannot describe the design prin-
ciples behind this in any detail. However business
processes mapped to workflows operate in the context
of each project and have direct ability to setting and
changing access control capabilities for team mem-
bers of the project. This architecture allows the de-
sign, enactment and development of a variety of busi-
ness processes as needed in an evolutionary manner
that supports the flexible and nearly ad-hoc nature of
Dynamic eCollaboration. Along with the other com-
ponents of the framework supporting Dynamic eCol-
laboration we have also fully implemented the work-
flow engine and hoping to publish its details in an up-
coming conference.
6 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE
WORK
In this paper we have presented Dynamic eCollab-
oration, an evolved form of electronic collaboration
aimed at organisations of all sizes. It combines a num-
ber of key concepts around project based collabora-
tion driven by virtual teams of people coming from
different organisations to form a common working
group for a particular purpose. Backed by a novel
approach to sharing web based information in a con-
trolled and reusable manner and a lightweight mech-
anism for sharing business processes, Dynamic eCol-
laboration represents a paradigm shift in the way busi-
ness collaboration can be performed. It allows partic-
ipants from all partner organisations to equally con-
tribute resources for the use of the project team, not
just open up existing systems and resources for use
by select few in an “extranet”. It empowers individu-
ICSOFT 2007 - International Conference on Software and Data Technologies
184
als with taking the initiative to share information and
resources and work collaborative while allowing each
organisation to contain any information leaks quickly
and effectively.
We see great opportunity for improvement in the
area of resource sharing to include the ability to ag-
gregate and share again the aggregated resources.
Also we are focusing our efforts in providing bet-
ter support to business users for creating new work-
flows for their projects easily via Ajax enabled web
GUIs. Nevertheless we have implemented the tech-
nology necessary to support Dynamic eCollaboration
in practice and have integrated it with our CBEADS
framework (Ginige, 2002). We are currently putting
the technology into practical use through our work
with a group of four SME organisations that wish to
collaborate with one another.
The new paradigm for business collaboration that
Dynamic eCollaboration embraces will not only lead
to the uptake of collaboration by SMEs, we strongly
believe it will also have lasting effects in the way
larger enterprises collaborate with their partners and
associates.
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