[Air-l] KM and CSCW in today's world

Barry Wellman wellman at chass.utoronto.ca
Wed Oct 31 13:21:44 PST 2001


story below

 Barry
 ___________________________________________________________________

  Barry Wellman        Professor of Sociology       NetLab Director
  wellman at chass.utoronto.ca   http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman
  
  Centre for Urban & Community Studies        University of Toronto
  455 Spadina Avenue   Toronto Canada M5S 2G8   fax:+1-416-978-7162
 ___________________________________________________________________




This story appeared on Network World Fusion at
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2001/1029collaboration.html

Terrorism spurs Web collaboration effort

By Carolyn Duffy Marsan
Network World, 10/29/01

An obscure Web-based collaboration system under development by the State
Department has caught the eye of Washington
decision-makers as a possible solution to the information-sharing
challenges that federal agencies face in the ongoing war against
terrorism.

The Overseas Presence Interagency Collaboration System was designed in
response to the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in
Kenya and Tanzania. Currently in a prototype phase, the system would
provide leading-edge knowledge management and
collaboration tools over an intranet to 40 federal agencies with overseas
operations, including the Defense Department, U.S.
Agency for International Development and the Peace Corps.

"Today, you've got 40 agencies with multiple ways of communicating. It
looks like a spaghetti bowl," says Fernando Burbano,
CIO of the State Department and the lead architect of the overseas Web
collaboration system (See our interview with Burbano).
"We want to go to a virtual knowledge management system that's secure.
It's going to be available at the classified and unclassified
levels."

The overseas Web collaboration system entered the limelight this fall
after the worst terrorist attacks ever in the U.S. State
Department officials say this system is the furthest along in terms of
providing the level of interagency coordination needed to
respond to new threats such as the recent outbreak of anthrax.

"The requirement for interagency collaboration and cooperation is
paramount, not just overseas but domestically," says Anthony
Muse, deputy CIO of the State Department. "Our project has been in the
works for a year and half. We're not a
Johnny-come-lately." 

In recent weeks, Burbano has briefed two Senate committees, the White
House Office of Homeland Security and the Office of
Management and Budget on the design and status of the overseas Web
collaboration system. While this system was designed for
counterterrorism initiatives, it also supports crisis coordination, law
enforcement, trade relations and human rights efforts. 

"Even though [this system] is for foreign-affairs agencies, it's the same
40 agencies that need to communicate domestically,"
Burbano says. "The same software and hardware could be used."

The CIOs of the 10 primary foreign-affairs agencies drafted the
architecture and requirements for the overseas Web collaboration
system. The system was funded last April, when Secretary of State Colin
Powell allocated $17 million for a prototype and pilot
test of the system as part of his agenda to upgrade the State Department's
network infrastructure.

In June, the State Department awarded three contracts to prototype the Web
collaboration system. The winning contractors were
Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), which teamed with
PricewaterhouseCoopers; SRA International, which teamed
with IBM; and Accenture, which teamed with General Dynamics and Booz-Allen
& Hamilton. 

The State Department plans to select a winning contractor in January and
to conduct a five-month pilot test of the system at posts
in Mexico and India starting in May. The pilot test will include 2,400
users from the State Department and other agencies.

The State Department will run the Web collaboration system on its OpenNet
Plus architecture, which consists of 30,000 Pentium
desktops and servers running Windows NT. The system will support document
sharing, instant messaging, chat rooms,
whiteboarding and advanced searching.

"The big thing here is knowledge management. This isn't just a network,"
Burbano says. "What is knowledge management? In my
view, it's getting the right information to the right people at the right
time regardless of their location to support decision-making in
a distributive fashion."

The system will let users create communities of interest across agencies.
Users from outside the State Department will access the
system via a Web browser, and the system will be secured with public-key
encryption, firewalls and intrusion-detection software. 

"Why do we need knowledge management at overseas posts or domestic
locations? It's important because people rotate, and we
lose know-how. We've got to capture best practices. And we need to find
who else is working on something and who has the
expertise," Burbano says. 

A classified version of the overseas Web collaboration system, also under
development, will use the same hardware and software
as the prototypes, Burbano says. 

Industry bidders say the system is at the forefront of applying knowledge
management and collaboration techniques. 

"We do our own knowledge management here, but we're pushing the envelope
with what we're doing in the State Department,"
says Meg McLaughlin, a partner at Accenture. 

"They are focusing on the use of commercial, off-the-shelf software, and
they are making the commitment to modify their
business practices instead of modifying software," she adds.

Dean Thorsell, vice president of SAIC, says most federal agencies only
have basic collaboration tools such as e-mail. "Just having
access to shared documents over the Web is something that really takes
[users] to the next step," he says. 

Industry sources say the overseas Web collaboration system could cost from
$30 million to more than $100 million, depending on
the number of software tools selected and how they are deployed.

Deployment is not funded until the government's 2004 fiscal year, which
begins in October 2003. But State Department officials
say they could move up the schedule if money is allocated sooner.

"If [Congress] moved up some money to this year and to FY03, maybe we
could speed up the worldwide deployment," Burbano
says. "Those things are being looked at." 





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