Complex collaboration, knowledge sharing and interoperability

Inter-organizational collaboration is often viewed through the lens of computer-mediated projects, leading to an understanding of the needed infrastructure and environment as requiring primarily software interoperability. This has been extended in recent efforts by the European Commission and others to include enterprise interoperability and aspects of knowledge interoperability. Here it is argued that further extensions are needed, in particular, more robust understandings of knowledge in a collaborative context and of enterprise interoperability, and identification and creation of collaborative structures, especially for more complex collaborative projects and ventures. The nature of robust inter-organizational collaborative behaviour relies upon several layers of hard software development integrated with the soft engineering knowledge processes. Long-lived interoperability activities expose the need for systemic, collaborative awareness to achieve continual, emergent survival. The successful exchange between platforms and tools with collaborative structures and policies is an activity that can only succeed with approaches that do not attempt to reduce the working mechanisms that separate working parts of a whole.