Future Trends

Have a look at the speech by Bror Salmelin, held during the SEEM workshop in March 2003, giving background on the philosophy and objectives.
"Europe has three main pillars in its challenges. The single market, single currency and most recently the single European e-Economy - all these breaking the traditional boundaries. The Lisbon goals are valid, more than ever, if we look at the timeline and also keep the enlargement in mind. Knowledge and competence is in the center."

Collaboration and Competencies@Work Road Map

(update of 25.6.2003, official responsible : Bror Salmelin)

Objective

The roadmap aims at integrating IST research, future regulatory and policy frameworks, and wide European deployment and adoption of collaborative and other new work paradigms and technologies by citizens and organisations.

The focus of the roadmap is on creating new working paradigms through research in technologies for collaborative work and competence networking, targeted on high productivity and value creation by exploiting new ways of organising work in the sustainable networked knowledge-based economy. The roadmap is based on the development and integration of new technologies, new architectures and new organisational processes for the professional roles of individuals within or outside an organisational or commercial context.

The work of the roadmap is targeting a time horizon of five to ten years from now, to have the fullest possible impact on productivity and the organisation of work structures in the sustainable knowledge society.

The roadmap is directly supporting EU policies and priorities set out in the Lisbon, Stockholm, Gothenburg and Barcelona summits by ensuring that Europe plays a prominent role in defining and exploiting the next wave of work innovation.

Background

The real benefits of the networked economy will only be reached when organisational models can take full advantage of technical developments enabling full frictionless interaction and collaboration among the competencies/participants needed to contribute to a task. Seamless collaboration is one of the critical enablers for new working organisations and value creation processes in the networked economy.

The collaboration process can be described as being between individuals, artificial entities (web services, grid services, intelligent agents), groups or organisations, and as leading, in principle, to similar process specifications irrespective of granularity. Considering commerce, micro-enterprises can play a very important part in the new, competence-based, wealth creation in Europe.

The roadmap is pushing the individually-centric ambient intelligence landscape in the professional roles of citizens, as individuals or as part of their organisations or communities.

Technologies

The technological objective of this roadmap is to create new collaborative technologies for professional and working environments, enabling new organisation of work, to capture and foster new work paradigms in the networked knowledge society.

The main focus of the research work is in the following fields:

knowledge management in distributed environments
eProfessions and eProfessionals, including eResearch and eResearchers
collaborative work processes
setting up large scale trials and demonstrations in rural and sectorial settings

Mobility and work in the knowledge economy is one of the focal areas, including services and new organisational paradigms in the networked economy.

The work focuses on the development and innovative use of ICT in continuous, extended and/or location-independent/mobile work environments for both individuals and groups. The aim of this roadmap is to promote greater efficiency and competitiveness of the workforce to participate in the global knowledge economy. This part of the roadmap links directly to the IST priority.

The critical technologies enabling the collaboration and competence sharing are e.g.

new shared work space technologies,

peer-to-peer technologies,
virtual and augmented reality,

knowledge management in information dense and integrated, often media-rich environments,
technologies for enabling smooth collaboration between artificial and human entities, mobility and multimodality,
technologies for natural interaction,

cognitivity and semantics capturing technologies for collaborative work and organisations,

ambient and embedded systems for communities of practise and new organisation of work. Holonic systems and moreover real-time configurability of scarce resources are one of the key systems research issues.

Work done in Directorate F is closely related to the roadmap, e.g. the actions on disappearing computer, Grid infrastructures, and integrated testbeds and research infrastructures are essential elements to increase the impact of the roadmap..

Policy links and work

The second objective is to exploit the research results fully, having a major impact on the networked economy, by promoting and catalysing development and uptake of these collaborative technologies in Europe, including remote and rural areas, and in various sectoral settings. This part of the roadmap is strongly linked to the eEurope action plan as well as the priority 7 and priority 8 of the FP6.

This wide impact will be ensured by strengthening and building new Interservice initiatives within DG INFSO and more widely with other Commission services, and by catalysing pan-European activities on national and regional level, in the spirit of ERA.

The critical policy work can be listed in the following topics:

input to the creation of best European practices in work and professional life of individuals and in organisations.
initiate and support research on the value creation processes in the intangible economy by new collaboration structures (centerless organisations, cybercommunities, communities of practise etc) which use the broadband networking infrastructures to their full extent.
elaborating further the SEEM initiative a collaborative e-Space where artificial entities, organisations and individuals can interact with each other without technological and regulatory constraints.
Also the issue of enlargement together with the skills gap is suggesting the need for new collaborative environments to be rapidly integrated for location independent knowledge work. (also eSkills)
The rural information society is an important theme this roadmap is addressing, as the professional inclusion of all people to the networked economy, irrespective of their location.

The best practise (in accompanying measures) together with the proper application of regional and structural funds can play a significant role in reducing the need of physical mobility, which is seen as one of the big issues related to the mobility of workforce in the near future.

Future NoEs (and possibly also IPs) are likewise expected to have a significant impact on collaborative e-Work in different areas of research within the ERA; each will show a natural concern to develop an "eResearch" space for their particular area.

Expected deliverables

The objective of the roadmap is to develop and demonstrate new technologies and concepts for eWork in the sustainable European knowledge society. To achieve this the roadmap must ignite a mainstream activity of shared collaborative work in and within organisations and eProfessionals.

The work should lead in short term to a significant portfolio of research projects in collaborative working environments and work organisation in the IST priority, cutting across and integrating research with policy work.

This project portfolio (@work) is clustered strongly, and should be linked to national, regional and sectorial initiatives in the spirit of ERA. To achieve this an advisory and co-ordinating expert structure will be created.

Research on the socio-economic implications of the new drivers of networking and knowledge sharing e.g. in cyberorganisations and collaborative groups is expected to be highlighted in the policy priorities.

Research projects will also be linked to future policy development to ensure the applicability of the developed technologies.

In the given time horizon of five years there should be a wide interest and numerous examples arising of good practise in new collaboration spaces and organisation of work in centerless organisations and communities of practise. These examples should carry as core components the research results of the clustered research activities and to be ready to be multiplied throughout Europe leading these new work practices to be the mainstream of working by 2010.

Achieving full impact will require a correspondingly receptive mental and societal infrastructure. The wide constituency (including politicians) needs to be made fully aware of the new and emerging paradigms increasing the productivity and quality of working life in the networked knowledge-based economy.

This part of the work is done by using the Internet and also by targeted publications (reports of workshops, leaflets of projects and other success stories) and by other contributions in key events.

At the mid-term the unit and the relevant Commission services should be considered as the melting point and creator for advanced actions, fostering collaborative tools and the paradigm shift to new work organisation. The unit responsible for this roadmap should be seen as a positive catalyser for a wide range of innovative actions, and also being the competence centre for liaising the clientele with the relevant Commission services.

The roadmap should have catalysed with its actions a strong multidisciplinary research and a community behind to ensure the full impact in the spirit of ERA, and to bring forward the European practises and values in new work methods and environments.

The long term aim is to achieve full coverage of the technologies needed, and to integrate them to enable collaboration across organisational, regional and other boundaries in Europe, in the spirit of the Single Market policy. The work in this area constructively elaborates SEEM concept which already appears in Priority 8.

At the same time, the idea of the SEEM should be further explored with a view to including this vision as one of the future policy and research priorities for WP 2005/2006, and in the follow up action plan to eEurope 2005.

The research work is expected to significantly contribute to the standardisation of common collaborative processes and environments.

Evaluation elements

Information Society Technologies will profoundly transform the European society and work landscape.

This leads to the need for holistic evaluation of the impact of the integrated approach, composing all the critical enablers for new collaborative work and organisation paradigms.

The main indicators are related to the use of the novel work concepts and collaborative processes in industry and other sectors, e.g.

number of companies supporting and participating in new work organisation
number of new shared workspaces in various sectors (of the economy, including research areas)
number and quality of regional and rural communities and applications environments for new professional paradigms
acceptance of new collaborative work environments and processes among eProfessionals, including take-up and support in professional associations

More direct indicators can be found from the numbers of the activities related to the overall objective, like the following:

number of Integrated Projects and Networks of Excellence Projects and proposals
number of Networks of Excellence and Integrated Projects developing a collaborative e-Space for their own research
number and coverage of national, regional and sectoral development environments and testbeds
workshops and presentations for different audiences, including general public
quality of priority 8 research and exploitation of the results to shape future policy on the new work paradigms and organisation issues
inclusion of collaborative mobile/location independent work environments and organisation in the IST Workprogramme
inclusion of collaborative mobile work environments and organisation in the eEurope 2005 action plan, and the continuum of it.

The development will also be measurable from the number of micro-enterprises and SMEs actually participating in the new collaborative planning and control methods using mobile devices and other technologies developed in and supported by the collaborative work section of the IST priority.

Indirect effects of the projects can also be seen in the growth in numbers of new workplaces in the knowledge work, among e.g. the mobile eProfessionals and the creation and growth of co-operative planning and control in Europe.

An increase in the number of enterprises supporting mobile work and drawing them into communities of practise should be the mainstream behaviour by 2010.

The next generation of legal and policy frameworks covering more individual-centric collaborative work structures, on European and national levels needs to be shaped, enabling and catalysing the development for new collaborative structures and processes. New concepts of eProfessionals need to be created based on open shared workspaces.

Affordability and usability of the shared workspaces is also one important criterion for our success. There should by 2010 not exist any high cost or skills barrier to use modern work practices throughout the society.

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Last update: 24/11/2006