BICC´s experience of multimedia communications: issues in CSCW

Since 1987, a small team from BICC has been looking into CSCW and, more particularly, multimedia communications. BICC was involved in the RACE I project DIMUN. The focus of the DIMUN project was to discover how to use multimedia communications to allow a group of people who are geographically separated to work together as effectively as a group working together in a single room. As a result of the success of DIMUN, BICC joined a RACE application pilot called BRICC (Broadband Integrated Communications in Construction). This has two aims; to reproduce the DIMUN results using ISDN, and to address the requirements of Balfour Beatty, the construction arm of the BICC Group: As a result of these projects, BICC has become aware of some of the critical issues in the application of CSCW. In this paper the author looks at these. The issues are broken down into a number of areas-need, quality, usability, control and security