Towards addressing the requirements for coordination in the distributed South African public sector from a virtual community-centric collaboration process lifecycle perspective

Achieving effective cooperation and collaboration is difficult when multiple actors are involved; are geographically distributed; and are engaged in a variety of diverse, interdependent activities. One prominent problem is insufficient coordination. Coordination problems are more pronounced when participants are distributed across space and time, as in the South African public sector. The complexity associated with the distributed nature of the environment, heterogeneity, autonomy and the increasing need to collaborate, provokes the need to develop a novel coordination support system for the South African public sector. However, for a solution to be successful, certain requirements, motivated from both literature and the environmental scan of the public sector, conducted as a case study, must be adequately addressed. This paper argues that the mechanisms of an awareness based life-cycle model, characterised by virtual community properties from a collaboration perspective, can adequately account for the dynamic aspects of the coordination requirements in a distributed environment. The paper initiates with a brief introduction, succeeded with a review of the objectives and methodology employed. Next, a brief background relative to the requirements to be fulfilled and the desirable characteristics of the addressing model is explained. Thereafter, a discussion on how the model addresses the requirements ensues, followed by a discussion thereof. The paper concludes by highlighting the values, and limits of the artefact, while taking cognisance of subsequent, future work.