Self-service collaboration applications: a new paradigm in the development and deployment of collaborative environments

World-class organizations recognize that effective collaboration and teamwork is a source of competitive advantage. They seek to leverage technology to enable teams to work together more effectively. But as issues faced by distributed teams today become more information sensitive and change more rapidly, they also bring to life a new set of requirements for collaboration technology. These requirements cannot be addressed by traditional application development efforts, as their costs and long development cycles make them prohibitive. Nor can they be addressed adequately by general collaborative tools such as email and groupware. This paper introduces a new paradigm in developing and deploying collaboration applications for the more lightweight, task-oriented requirements that sometimes comprise the majority of a team's activities. It conjectures that in these situations, it is feasible, and in fact, necessary for end users, even without software training, to directly create and implement such applications themselves. This paper further outlines a new development framework to put this paradigm in action. And finally, this paper briefly discusses an ongoing project to enhance the Air Force's KnowledgeKineticstrade (K2 ) portal with a set of portlet design tools based on this framework