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| About Barry Hardy (Douglas Connect) |
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Dr. Barry Hardy currently manages the eCheminfo and InnovationWell community of practice activities of Douglas Connect and the training programs of the Knowledge Management Institute, Switzerland. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1990 from Syracuse University working in the area of computational chemistry, biophysics and computer-aided molecular modelling and drug design. Dr. Hardy has also been working in the area of knowledge management and communications since 1994 and has organised numerous international projects in the area of the chemical, life and medical sciences. He has also developed technology solutions for internet-based conferencing, tutor-supported e-learning, laboratory automation systems and computational chemistry and informatics. He is currently leading the Application and Knowledge Assessment Activities for the SYNERGY FP7 ICT project on Knowledge-oriented Collaboration, and serving as Coordinator for the OpenTox FP7 Health project on Predictive Toxicology. Dr. Hardy was a National Research Fellow at the FDA Center for Biologics and Evaluation, a Hitchings-Elion Fellow at Oxford University and CEO of Virtual Environments International. Further information on his ongoing activities are posted on the following blogs:
Cheminfostream: http://barryhardy.blogs.com/cheminfostream/
The Ferryman: http://barryhardy.blogs.com/theferryman/
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Knowledge-Oriented Collaboration in Virtual Organisation Structures
Barry Hardy, Douglas Connect
SYNERGY, a new 3 year European-funded Seventh Framework Research Project which commenced on the 1 February 2008, researches the knowledge sharing and collaboration support needs of stakeholders working collaboratively within partnerships and new virtual enterprise network and virtual organization business models.
The next phase of enterprise interoperability is the controlled sharing of knowledge within collaborations and virtual organisations and networks to the mutual benefit of all partners. Such knowledge will be a driver for new enhanced collaborative enterprises, able to achieve the global visions of enterprise interoperability. The SYNERGY project envisages the delivery of Collaboration Knowledge services through trusted third parties offering web-based services, exploitable through interoperability service utilities.
Next generation network and service infrastructures will generate new economic opportunities with new classes of Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 networked applications, whilst reducing operational expenditures. New utility-based service approaches are required to overcome the scalability, flexibility, dependability and security bottlenecks, of today’s network and service architectures which are primarily static and only able to support a limited number of devices, service features and limited confidence. Such new infrastructures will permit the emergence of a large variety of business models capable of dynamic and seamless end-to-end composition of resources across a multiplicity of devices, networks, providers and service domains.
New software-based services will need to be pervasive, ubiquitous and highly dynamic, and support a wide variety of nomadic interoperable devices and services, a variety of content formats and a multiplicity of delivery modes. They also have to support context awareness and the dynamic behaviour needed for applications with requirements that vary with time and context, and guarantee robustness, resilience, trust and security compatible with networks and software service platforms reaching a complexity and scale that are an order of magnitude greater than those of today’s infrastructures.
The overall aim of SYNERGY is to enhance support of the networked enterprise in the successful, timely creation of, and participation in collaborative structures by providing an infrastructure and services to discover, capture, deliver and apply knowledge relevant to collaboration creation and operation. Specifically SYNERGY aims to (a) provide semantic ontology-based modelling of knowledge structures on collaborative working; (b) develop the service-oriented self-adaptive SYNERGY holistic solution for knowledge-based collaboration services; and (c) facilitate the testing and evaluation of the efficiency and effectiveness of the SYNERGY solution in concrete case studies in business and industry.
Knowledge-oriented collaboration builds on state-of-the art research on Enterprise Interoperability. Data and information sharing are clear pre-requisites to application and interoperability of knowledge-oriented support for collaborative, virtual organisations. Process, service and enterprise models are fundamental: collaboration knowledge is knowledge of how to adapt and re-combine such models as business structures evolve. Small and Medium Size Enterprises increasingly are integral contributors and innovators in successful networks, and so methods and tools for Collaboration Knowledge Sharing must be accessible without major investment of capital or revenue for software acquisition, or of effort in developing skills to implement and use complex software tools. An Open Source approach to project-related software development on SYNERGY will be taken.
This presentation will focus on the user requirements that have been revealed in the first stage of the project research. These requirements reflect that many complex business, organizational and collaboration issues and challenges interact to guide practices and support services required for making collaboration more effective. The selection of effective practice and service approaches depend significantly on the context, culture and nature of the collaboration area and unpredictable events or complex issues arising. The implications for collaboration technology development imply that much more flexible and reactive support solutions are needed, and that even if we have such solutions, that overcoming culture challenges to collaboration are key ingredients for success.
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