A collaborative network is a network consisting of a variety of entities (e.g. organizations and people) that are largely autonomous, geographically distributed, and heterogeneous in terms of their operating environment, culture, social capital and goals, but that collaborate to better achieve common or compatible goals, and whose interactions are supported by computer networks. The discipline of collaborative networks focuses on the structure, behavior, and evolving dynamics of networks of autonomous entities that collaborate to better achieve common or compatible goals. [1] [2] There are several manifestations of collaborative networks, e.g.: [1]
The seven essential elements of collaborative networks:
A reference model for collaborative networks is a fundamental instrument for the smooth development of the area. An example of reference model is ARCON (A Reference model for COllaborative Networks). [3] [4] An annual conference focused on Collaborative Networks is the Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises ('PRO-VE'). [5] sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and Society of Collaborative Networks (SOCOLNET).
If collaborative networks evolve and become increasingly popular with corporations and their extended networks, governance and security issues will need to be addressed. Of particular relevance is the study of behavioral aspects and reference models for collaborative networks.
Collaborative software or groupware is application software designed to help people working on a common task to attain their goals. One of the earliest definitions of groupware is "intentional group processes plus software to support them".
Social software, also known as social apps, include communication and interactive tools often based on the Internet. Communication tools typically handle the capturing, storing and presentation of communication, usually written but increasingly including audio and video as well. Interactive tools handle mediated interactions between a pair or group of users. They focus on establishing and maintaining a connection among users, facilitating the mechanics of conversation and talk. Social software generally refers to software that makes collaborative behaviour, the organisation and moulding of communities, self-expression, social interaction and feedback possible for individuals. Another element of the existing definition of social software is that it allows for the structured mediation of opinion between people, in a centralized or self-regulating manner. The most improved area for social software is that Web 2.0 applications can all promote cooperation between people and the creation of online communities more than ever before.
In computer science, a software agent is a computer program that acts for a user or other program in a relationship of agency, which derives from the Latin agere : an agreement to act on one's behalf. Such "action on behalf of" implies the authority to decide which, if any, action is appropriate. Agents are colloquially known as bots, from robot. They may be embodied, as when execution is paired with a robot body, or as software such as a chatbot executing on a phone or other computing device. Software agents may be autonomous or work together with other agents or people. Software agents interacting with people may possess human-like qualities such as natural language understanding and speech, personality or embody humanoid form.
A virtual organization is a temporary or permanent collection of geographically dispersed individuals, groups, organizational units, or entire organizations that depend on electronic linking in order to complete the production process. Virtual organizations do not represent a firm’s attribute but can be considered as a different organizational form and carries out the objectives of cyber diplomacy.
Enterprise integration is a technical field of enterprise architecture, which is focused on the study of topics such as system interconnection, electronic data interchange, product data exchange and distributed computing environments.
Social peer-to-peer processes are interactions with a peer-to-peer dynamic. These peers can be humans or computers. Peer-to-peer (P2P) is a term that originated from the popular concept of the P2P distributed computer application architecture which partitions tasks or workloads between peers. This application structure was popularized by file sharing systems like Napster, the first of its kind in the late 1990s.
The West Midlands Collaborative Commerce Marketplace (WMCCM) is an online marketplace that promotes the services of small-medium-sized engineering enterprises in the English county West Midlands. It is financed by the European Regional Development Fund, based within Warwick Manufacturing Group at the University of Warwick at Coventry. The marketplace was founded by Professor Jay Bal with Dr Mark Swift. As of 2006, 2,000 firms had joined the website.
Personal knowledge networks have been primarily conceived by researchers with regard to the inter-firm knowledge sources between organisations, where networks are informal and personal. Instead of looking at the organisational context, some researchers investigate the intra-firm aspects at personal level of organisational knowledge networks, where knowledge management (KM) processes start and end. Various technologies and behaviours support personal knowledge networking for example wikis, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and relationship networks. Researchers propose that kmowledge management can happen with little explicit governance. This trend is called "grass-roots KM" as opposed to traditional, top-down enterprise KM.
A virtual enterprise (VE) is a temporary alliance of businesses that come together to share skills or core competencies and resources in order to better respond to business opportunities, and whose cooperation is supported by computer networks.
An enterprise architecture framework defines how to create and use an enterprise architecture. An architecture framework provides principles and practices for creating and using the architecture description of a system. It structures architects' thinking by dividing the architecture description into domains, layers, or views, and offers models - typically matrices and diagrams - for documenting each view. This allows for making systemic design decisions on all the components of the system and making long-term decisions around new design requirements, sustainability, and support.
A service catalog, is an organized and curated collection of any and all business and information technology related services that can be performed by, for, or within an enterprise.
Governance, risk management and compliance (GRC) is the term covering an organization's approach across these three practices: governance, risk management, and compliance. The first scholarly research on GRC was published in 2007 where GRC was formally defined as "the integrated collection of capabilities that enable an organization to reliably achieve objectives, address uncertainty and act with integrity." The research referred to common "keep the company on track" activities conducted in departments such as internal audit, compliance, risk, legal, finance, IT, HR as well as the lines of business, executive suite and the board itself.
The Method for an Integrated Knowledge Environment (MIKE2.0) is an open source delivery methodology for enterprise information management consultants. MIKE2.0 was released in December 2006 by BearingPoint's Information Management team under the leadership of Robert Hillard. The project used Creative Commons Attribution License and was implemented by Sean McClowry. The project is now run by the MIKE2.0 Governance Association, a non-profit organisation based in Switzerland, with BearingPoint and Deloitte as the founding members. In March 2013 a book Information Development Using MIKE2.0 was published promoting it.
James G. "Jim" Nell is an American engineer. He was the principal investigator of the Manufacturing Enterprise Integration Project at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and is known for his work on enterprise integration.
Open Cobalt is a free and open-source software platform for constructing, accessing, and sharing virtual worlds both on local area networks or across the Internet, with no need for centralized servers.
OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software platform consists of interrelated components that control diverse, multi-vendor hardware pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center. Users manage it either through a web-based dashboard, through command-line tools, or through RESTful web services.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise and its predecessor entities have a long history of developing and selling networking products. Today it offers campus and small business networking products through its wholly owned company Aruba Networks which was acquired in 2015. Prior to this, HP Networking was the entity within HP offering networking products.
Cloud manufacturing (CMfg) is a new manufacturing paradigm developed from existing advanced manufacturing models and enterprise information technologies under the support of cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT), virtualization and service-oriented technologies, and advanced computing technologies. It transforms manufacturing resources and manufacturing capabilities into manufacturing services, which can be managed and operated in an intelligent and unified way to enable the full sharing and circulating of manufacturing resources and manufacturing capabilities. CMfg can provide safe and reliable, high quality, cheap and on-demand manufacturing services for the whole lifecycle of manufacturing. The concept of manufacturing here refers to big manufacturing that includes the whole lifecycle of a product.
The history of business architecture has its origins in the 1980s. In the next decades business architecture has developed into a discipline of "cross-organizational design of the business as a whole" closely related to enterprise architecture. The concept of business architecture has been proposed as a blueprint of the enterprise, as a business strategy, and also as the representation of a business design.
Collaborative Control Theory (CCT) is a collection of principles and models for supporting the effective design of collaborative e-Work systems. Beyond human collaboration, advances in information and communications technologies, artificial intelligence, multi-agent systems, and cyber physical systems have enabled cyber-supported collaboration in highly distributed organizations of people, robots, and autonomous systems. The fundamental premise of CCT is: Without effective augmented collaboration by cyber support, working in parallel to and in anticipation of human interactions, the potential of emerging activities such as e-Commerce, virtual manufacturing, telerobotics, remote surgery, building automation, smart grids, cyber-physical infrastructure, precision agriculture, and intelligent transportation systems cannot be fully and safely materialized. CCT addresses the challenges and emerging solutions of such cyber-collaborative systems, with emphasis on issues of computer-supported and communication-enabled integration, coordination and augmented collaboration. CCT is composed of eight design principles: (1) Collaboration Requirement Planning (CRP); (2) e-Work Parallelism (EWP); (3) Keep It Simple, System (KISS); (4) Conflict/Error Detection and Prevention (CEDP); (5) Fault Tolerance by Teaming (FTT); (6) Association/Dissociation (AD); (7) Dynamic Lines of Collaboration (DLOC); (8) Best Matching (BM).