Abstract: Can teams that don't spend time physically together be effective? The answer is yes - so long as they can find a way to build credibility and trust Technology has made global teamwork an everyday reality for thousands of people Software developers in the United States and Europe work with programmers in India to design systems and write code; bankers trade a common book of US government bonds around the world 24 hours a day; medical specialists collaborate with local doctors in remote regions to diagnose and treat rare conditions; and country managers coordinate production plans and marketing campaigns across Europe Video conferences, voicemail, electronic live-boards, the Internet and corporate intranets, groupware, and virtual team rooms are just some of the technologies that enable people to work together no matter where they are based, giving them access to countless new business opportunities Yet many corporations have invested millions of dollars in top-of-the-line technology, only to be disappointed when there is no commensurate improvement in performance Although technology creates business openings by enabling us to communicate with colleagues and business partners in far-flung places, we cannot rely on technology alone to capture them Human relationships are still paramount Take the case of a US-based law firm serving a client's Japanese affiliate A senior partner in the firm used voicemail, e-mail, and video conferences to communicate with the firm's Japanese partners, with whom he had not worked before This seemed reasonable given the time and money trips across the Pacific would have consumed, and the apparently cordial atmosphere of an initial face-to-face meeting in Japan Electronic communications, including a video conference every six weeks or so, seemed to indicate progress But the US lawyer began to grow suspicious when requests for intermediate reports were acknowledged, but not fulfilled Distracted by other client demands, he did not follow up, expecting his Japanese colleagues to deliver as agreed But four months into the project, the client's CEO called to complain about shoddy work - a situation the US lawyer felt would never have arisen had he known the other team members, or had everyone been working in the same place On reflection, the lawyer realized he had been wrong to assume that other team members shared his objectives and standards It had not occurred to him that serving the client's affiliate might not be a priority for his Japanese partners, or that their purpose might differ To make matters worse, he had failed to define sufficiently specific performance goals for monitoring the team's progress In the end, he had to fly in a team from the United States to redo a large part of the work, at huge expense to the firm Horror stories like this abound The ease with which people can contact one another in today's business world makes them forget how difficult it is to work well as a team But effective teamwork is hard to pull off at the best of times, and if team members come from different cultures, speak different languages, and seldom have the luxury of face-to-face meetings in which to size up their colleagues, it can prove a nightmare Teamwork depends in great measure on members' ability to trust one another, and technology can be no substitute for the relationships that engender such trust Successful global teams therefore pay great attention to building the foundations of sound teamwork But they also work hard to compensate for some of the human elements that are inevitably lost when teams work together, yet apart Real differences Working in teams that span the globe poses problems not usually encountered when a group of people work together in the same building Some are obvious If members of global teams work in different time zones, then responses to queries or requests for information needed to get on with a task will be delayed …

Abstract: Virtual acjion teams are temporary goal directed work groups which never meet face-to-face. Technology exits to support distributed teams, however groupware is not always flexible or accessible, so there has been a wholesale adoption of World Wide Web standards. We analyse the groupware requirements of virtual teams and conclude that collaborative design is necessary to reflect the balance between structure and flexibility which characterise effective team work. A framework for asynchronous, distributed, collaborative design is presented. This consists of activities and resources. The activities follow a double iteration cycle and encapsulate requirements for structure, flexibility, monitoring and role specification. Rapid development is supported by reusable Perl CGI modules. The framework is used to develop Web sotlware to support an international virtual action team the process and product are described. Preliminary comments on the utility of the framework and conclusions are reported.

Abstract: This proposed research will focus on designing, implementing, and evaluating a conceptual framework for intelligent agents that supports processes of managing projectrelevant knowledge inside a virtual team in designing a multimedia system over the

Abstract: This case study explores the use of virtual team members utilizing optimized communications to manage a greater number of projects without defocusing individual staff members from their primary project responsibilities. Staff members develop and maintain online guidelines and templates based on their strengths and experience. Project teams document and maintain project status, issues and questions online. Projects that require the expertise of staff members who have a different primary project utilize these staff members as virtual project team members. Virtual team members allocate a portion of their time viewing secondary projects online to review status, answer questions and make recommendations. Thus more project teams can operate simultaneously and efficiently.

Abstract: In many professions where individuals must work in a team in a high stress environment to accomplish a time-critical task, individual and team performance can benefit from joint training using distributed virtual environments (DVEs). One professional field that lacks but needs a high-fidelity team training environment is the field of emergency medicine. Currently, emergency department (ED) medical personnel train by using words to create a metal picture of a situation for the physician and staff, who then cooperate to solve the problems portrayed by the word picture. The need in emergency medicine for realistic virtual team training is critical because ED staff typically encounter rarely occurring but life threatening situations only once in their careers and because ED teams currently have no realistic environment in which to practice their team skills. The resulting lack of experience and teamwork makes diagnosis and treatment more difficult. Virtual environment based training has the potential to redress these shortfalls. The objective of our research is to develop a state-of-the-art virtual environment for emergency medicine team training. The virtual emergency room (VER) allows ED physicians and medical staff to realistically prepare for emergency medical situations by performing triage, diagnosis, and treatment on virtual patients within an environment that provides them with the tools they require and the team environment they need to realistically perform these three tasks. There are several issues that must be addressed before this vision is realized. The key issues deal with distribution of computations; the doctor and staff interface to the virtual patient and ED equipment; the accurate simulation of individual patient organs' response to injury, medication, and treatment; and an accurate modeling of the symptoms and appearance of the patient while maintaining a real-time interaction capability. Our ongoing work addresses all of these issues. In this paper we report on our prototype VER system and its distributed system architecture for an emergency department distributed virtual environment for emergency medical staff training. The virtual environment enables emergency department physicians and staff to develop their diagnostic and treatment skills using the virtual tools they need to perform diagnostic and treatment tasks. Virtual human imagery, and real-time virtual human response are used to create the virtual patient and present a scenario. Patient vital signs are available to the emergency department team as they manage the virtual case. The work reported here consists of the system architectures we developed for the distributed components of the virtual emergency room. The architectures we describe consist of the network level architecture as well as the software architecture for each actor within the virtual emergency room. We describe the role of distributed interactive simulation and other enabling technologies within the virtual emergency room project.

Abstract: Concurrent engineering (CE) is a manufacturing philosophy and right-first-time approach to the product lifecycle that has the potential to produce dramatic reductions in product development time and cost. The paper discusses the CONCERT architecture (Concurrent Engineering Support) distributed middleware services which support concurrent engineering. The CONCERT architecture allows Internet clients (virtual team members) to access these middleware services through a special cross-platform control-panel application or (in a restricted form) via the World Wide Web.

Abstract: In this paper we analyse the empirical findings on the impact of mediated group memory (guided information retrieval) on collaborative small group decision-making. In a first approach, we implemented a group decision support system which consists of communication software, decision support software (the Analytic Hierarchy Process method), document exchanging facilities, but most important allowing groups of people to travel together as a team through the Internet. This virtual team is guided by a “knowledge mediator” who determines through the phases of the decision—making process the analogous sources of information. In a first series of experiments, we examine the effects this structure has on small groups of decision makers carrying out tasks with varying complexity and with a need for “rich” multimedia information exchange. The main factors that were taken into account are the time spent to reach the decision, the number of alternative scenarios considered by the group, but also the particula...