Towards cscw: Metalevel environments for enhanced group and organization effectiveness

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Abstract
The article deals with Computer‐Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and its valuable contributions to organizing cooperation and joint work among partners in many contexts. In the field of CSCW, complex issues such as coordination and negotiation can be identified as being characteristic, fundamental and important research topics that have to be elaborated on urgently. Better support in coordination and in negotiation, and a stronger use of knowledge about people involved, roles, positions, values, strategies, and activities seem to be important topics. It is the view of this article that such aims can only be achieved if there is a close coupling of CSCW components with a powerful underlying corporate information system. In order to achieve these aims, enterprise information systems and group support are to be combined as a strategic way into the informational future of the enterprise. In this context, a good conceptual model and proper implementation of an Enterprise Data Model (EDM) are a fundamental prerequisite for full group support in an organizational environment. The EDM can be considered as a basic support repository for general planning processes. The article introduces an architectual concept for Computer‐Supported Collaborative Systems (CSCS) consisting of a three‐level system architecture of a basic object level, user and coordination object level, and a specific goal‐oriented object level. The approach in this article is based on experiences from the application field of distributed software development.