The authors developed a program called "Team Analytics" written in Perl CGI scripts hosted on an Apache 2 webserver. This program displays the people in a world wide work group to the user. The visualization includes a picture of all the team members, a flow chart of who works for who, a pie chart of the distribution of groups, time zones everyone is in, and a "bizcard" that tells what everyone's exact job is.
This development is quite a big step forward for international people working independently. It tries to tackle some of the biggest problems of working remotely, knowing your group. The fact that it can be launched from an email client really integrates it into a possible everyday use. Future use should probably include quick communication links, like chat or video chat. This seems like a great step in the direction of creating a suite of communication apps for remote location working.
Did they compare it with any existing products? It sounds like it could eventually become something like Sharepoint. It would be interesting to see if they could people some people away from it.
ReplyDelete