Asynchronous coordination of virtual teams in creative applications (co-design or co-engineering): requirements and design criteria

This paper reports on asynchronous coordination of a virtual team in a virtual enterprise. It confronts two approaches: explicit coordination based on explicit process modeling, and implicit coordination, based on group awareness, to finally conclude that a good coordination is a subtle mixture of both approaches. For each approach and for the combination of both, requirements and design criteria are given and a study of the state of the art is done.

1. Introduction

This paper reports on the thoughts of a virtual team¹

A Virtual Team is a group of people distributed in space and time.

, composed of three research teams (one in computing at LORIA²

LORIA: Laboratory of Research in Computer Sciences and its Applications (http://www.loria.fr)

, one in telecommunications at France Telecom R&D³

France Telecom R&D: France Telecom Research & Development

, and a last one in building construction and design at CRAI⁴

CRAI: Research Center in Architecture and Engineering http://www.crai.archi.fr)

), in a common project about virtual team coordination.