Mobility of context for project teams

Abstract

In the last decade, bureaucratic organizational hierarchies increasingly have been replaced with flatter organizational forms, bringing together people from different disciplines to form project teams within and between organizations. Distributed project teams often are self-configuring networks of mobile and "fixed" people, devices, and applications. They are the natural next step in the evolution of distributed computing, after client-server, Web-based, and peer-to-peer computing. A newly emerging requirement is to facilitate not just mobility of content (i.e. to support a multitude of devices and connectivity modes) to project members, but also mobility of context (i.e. to provide traceable and continuous support of relationships between people, artifacts, and business processes). The contribution of this paper is to present the design goals, the architecture, and implementation of a system aiming at supporting mobility of context for project teams, enabling traceable and continuous support of associations (relationships) between people, artifacts, and business processes.