Modern knowledge work in the office of the future will be characterized by the dimensions of mobility, distribution, collaboration, and by being embedded in clearly defined goals and processes.
The office of the future is planned to actively adapt to frequently changing organizational procedures. Typically, those procedures are innate. Therefore, offices and their respective infrastructures must be individually customized for every organization, and ultimately for every individual and his or her respective tasks.
Although innovative solutions in relevant areas (such as document management, information retrieval, communication support, workflow-systems, information and knowledge exchange, semantic web, etc.) are cause for hope, there are still multiple difficulties standing in the way of the expected productivity gain: media breaks, unsuitable structures, missing process communication, and information overflow are prominent examples of today?s obstacles. Promising approaches from recent research, for example in the field of business process-oriented knowledge management, find their way only with difficulty into common office practices. The development and provision of a multi-functional platform for document processing as the basis for integrated support systems for the flexible exchange of information, structures, processes, and services promises effective support for the targeted cooperative knowledge work.
It is in this context, that the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence in cooperation with the Fraunhofer-Institut für Experimentelles Software Engineering (IESE) and renowned partners in industry aims to develop, test, implement and present innovative solutions, prototypes and systems.
The project is part of the competence center ?Virtual Office of the Future?, conducted by both the Fraunhofer-Institut für Experimentelles Software Engeneering (IESE) and the DFKI-GmbH Kaiserslautern. In accordance to their respective expertise
? DFKI focuses on innovative knowledge work in modern office environments and develops new solutions to support both reactive and proactive exchange of context-specific knowledge, individual and organizational process know-how, and goal-oriented information extraction.
? FhG-IESE will focus on innovative aspects of software engineering, including respective architectures and the modelling and evaluation of technological innovations relevant for the virtual office of the future.
The intensive cooperation between the research partners on the one hand and the associated industrial partners on the other makes it possible to develop and test innovative solutions with a chance of becoming implemented in time as marketable products. The competence center provides industrial partners with the opportunity of combining their own products and software within joint projects, integrating these with research results, and deriving new products out of these partnerships.
Partners
Fraunhofer-Institut für Experimentelles Software Engineering (IESE)