2010-01-12: Gap Analysis between user needs and workspace capabilities

From Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP)
Revision as of 13:04, January 13, 2010 by Erinmr (talk | contribs)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

< Back to: Workspace Design | Workspace Design Ideas

Need to do a 'gap analysis' between what users say they need and what workspace capabilities exist.

What are the user requirements of a workspace:

  • easy to use
  • collect resources
  • connect resources to parts of the product
  • know what's going on
  • personalized (new users view vs. returning/core group view?)
  • ...


From the point of view of functional and conceptual characteristics, the top-ranked ones that have been identified for future CWEs are: (source)

  • Ease of use. The easier the system is, the higher productivity and acceptation the CWE achieves.
  • Interoperability. Services offered by different CWEs should interoperate in order to facilitate aspects such as mobility, flexibility, and the use of different groupware or CWEs.
  • Scalability. The CWE should have the ability to grow up according to the needs of the system and without losing the level of performance.
  • Service-Oriented Architecture. As we commented previously, CWE should be based on SOA in order to facilitate the decomposition of processes as well as the discovery and the composition of new services.
  • Anyplace – Anytime. It is pursued the pervasive collaboration, where the co-workers can collaborate anyplace – anytime.
  • Low Cost of Entry. The boundaries between different CWEs should be reduced in order to improve interoperability. Furthermore, this would facilitate the development of new CWEs as well as the use and integration of new applications.
  • Locating required Information. Users should be provided with accurate mechanisms to locate the information in CWEs. We should take into account that each time the quantity of the information generated in organizations is bigger. This retrieval of information should not be only oriented to get data but also to get knowledge.
  • Pro-active. The idea is that future collaborative services provide mechanisms to notify to persons, software services and machines.
  • Goal-oriented. The services offered in a CWE should be oriented to solve different problems in an intelligent way, according to the pattern followed by a human being based on decomposing activities in goals.

5 Most Critical Requirements for Enterprise Social Software 2010-01-08: SocialContext Ideas for adopting social media Enterprise social software: 5 requirements for success - from WP by SocialContext

  • It creates a sharing culture - ability to learn from others by observing, pivot from content to author and see who is an expert in field what else have they contributed... (Strength of weak ties)
  • You have absolute confidence in its adoption rate - dead easy to start. evident/obvious what's in it for me.
  • It fits the way people work - includes e-mail, mobile devices
  • It aggregates information from all sources
  • It has a low Total Cost of Ownership - easy to learn how to use.