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Activity Explorer is the first product from IBM that supports the notion of activity-centric collaboration. This new collaboration paradigm organizes and integrates resources, tools, and people around the computational concept of a work activity, with the goal of increasing work quality and efficiency. In essence, activity-centric collaboration is an important and compelling example of contextual collaboration. Activity Explorer emerged from a multiyear research effort on activity-centric collaboration. This paper presents an overview of the most significant milestones of this research program and highlights the most interesting findings. The research behind Activity Explorer is based on many empirical studies, design explorations, and infrastructural engineering and technical simulations. We demonstrate how our research not only influenced product direction, but also the IBM vision for activity-centric collaboration.
INTRODUCTION
Activity Explorer (AE), a part of the IBM Workplace* product family, introduced the concept of activity-centric collaboration to the market. The basic idea behind activity-centric collaboration is simple: Reorganize collaboration to reflect the work being done rather than the technologies that support the work. An activity can be defined as a logical unit of work that incorporates all the tools, people, and resources needed to get a job done. Just a few examples of activities are: preparing an executive meeting, planning a conference, closing a sale, planning and executing the conversion of multiple bank branches to new computing systems, and writing or responding to a request for proposal.
This paper provides an overview of the multiyear research behind AE and activity-centric collaboration. It describes the journey from research prototype to product. We summarize the concepts, findings, and outcomes of this successful researchto-product experience and present some new results of follow-up research on alert management, partial sharing, and design explorations.
The idea for AE emerged from our research on new "instant collaboration" techniques in the context of our Reinventing E-mail project.2-4 The problem of e-mail overload5 was a major trigger for our work on activity-centric collaboration. Research indicated that people use e-mail not only to communicate, but to manage various types of work activities.6'7 These types of work activities are not well supported by e-mail because-for activities that extend over long periods of time or over large numbers of participants-it rapidly becomes unmanageable.5 There is very little support for...