Communication media for supporting distributed engineering design

Looks at the communication media and organisational change requirements to support teamwork in a virtual organisation. A large engineering design organisation faced problems of coordinating concurrent engineering activity and geographical distribution. These problems were identified in detail, and the requirement for the design of an integrated communication support system was specified. Our analysis specifically related organisational requirements to existing media and technologies, and led to the specification and implementation of a cooperative design tool utilising groupware. Issues of changing organisational culture and evaluation of the prototype are discussed, and the generalisation to other virtual organisations is considered.

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