A framework for synchronizing collaborative technology with changing enterprise environment

Greater emphasis on innovation of products and services calls for greater attention to the way organizations support collaboration in their business activities. Such support is usually provided by collaborative technologies, which must co-evolve as the collaboration evolves. This requires ways to manage changes in a way that synchronizes technical and business evolution. The paper focuses on providing a systematic approach to manage change and ensure that technologies co-evolve with changes in business requirements. The approach is two fold. One is to develop a flexible collaborative infrastructure to support collaboration. The other is to describe collaborative business processes from a number of perspectives to provide the concepts to describe change. Change is then made by applying changes to the perspectives using the concepts in an orderly sequence. The perspectives include activity, process, knowledge and social perspectives. Semantics of change and its implementation in collaborative software are then defined in terms of the perspectives.