Research Project

VIRTO

The project "Design of Multimedia Technologies for Virtual Organizations" (VIRTO) belongs to the project compound Multimedia & Society funded by the state of North-Rhine-Westphalia (NRW). We closely cooperate with the University of Paderborn (Prof. Dr. Reinhard Keil-Slawik / Institute for Computer Science & Society) and the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD) (Dr. Michael Paetau / research department Culture - Media - Technology).

The Project Compound Multimedia & Society

The goal of the project compound Multimedia & Society is to examine the interactions of new technologies and and different areas of society - and to form them if possible. The focus lies on virtual organisations, conditions and constrains of media use and the economic consequences of the new technologies.

VIRTO Project

Multimedia information and communication systems are considered to play a key role for the evolution of information society as well as for the decentralization of organizations. The construction of virtual organizations depends on adequate system design.

The VIRTO project intends to answer the question how multimedia information, communication and cooperation technologies can be designed to support virtual organizations to deal successfully with organizational complexity and develop the necessary flexibility. The project will provide results relevant for computer science concerning the specific design of multimedia systems for virtual organizations. To do this, the project will develop design principles by researching the relevant literature and technology and by doing empirical research at an application partner's site. These design principles can then serve as a basis for future technological developments for virtual organizations as well as support the evaluation and refinement and customization of existing systems enahncing their usability for virtual organizations.

Our application partner is a Germany-wide operating "virtual consulting company" consisiting of about 200 employed and freelancing part- and full-time workers acting from small decentralized offices or home offices.

Basis of our work are findings from Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human Computer Interaction research. While in these communities basic functionality of multimedia information, communication and cooperation systems is a topic (e.g. distributed processing, shared workspaces, workflow and the like) the adaption of such systems to virtual organizations has not been discussed.

Publications

Kahler Helge; Rittenbruch Markus (1997): Cooperative Technology for Virtual Enterprises: Learning from CSCW. In: Proceedings of the IT-Vision Week '97 (angenommener Beitrag).

Rittenbruch, Markus; Kahler Helge (1998): Virtual Organizations as a Challange for UCD, Position Paper for the CSCW 98 Workshop on User Centered Design in Practice - Problems and Possiblities, CSCW 98.

Rittenbruch, Markus; Kahler Helge; Cremers Armin B. (1998): Supporting Cooperation in a Virtual Organization, ICIS'98, Helsinki, Finnland.

Lemken Birgit; Cremers Armin B. (1999): Virtuelle Organisationen - organisatorische und techniche Aspekte, Tagungsband zum Workshop des Forschungsverbundes NRW Multimedia und Gesellschaft, 9.-10. September 1999, Physikzentrum, Bad Honnef

Lemken, Birgit; Kahler Helge; Rittenbruch Markus. (2000): Sustained Knowledge Management by Organizational Culture, to be published in: Proceedings of the Hawai'i International Conference On System Sciences, January 4-7, 2000, Maui, Hawaii.

Project Members

Project Leader Univ.-Prof. Dr. Armin B. Cremers Institute for Computer Science III University of Bonn Roemerstr. 164 53117 Bonn Tel: 0 228 / 73 - 4282 Fax: 0 228 / 73 - 4382 eMail: abc@cs.uni-bonn.de

Contact Dipl.-Inform. Birgit Lemken Tel: 0 228 / 73 - 4391 Fax: 0 228 / 73 - 4382 eMail: lemken@cs.uni-bonn.de

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URL: http://www.cs.uni-bonn.de/~prosec/virto/virtobr.html