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EDS' Next Big Thing Blog: Read and Respond to What the EDS Fellows Say About Technology

Read and respond to what the EDS Fellows have to say about the future of technology on EDS' Next Big Thing Blog on eds.com.

Is collaboration a game only people can play?

by Charlie Bess

I was thinking about the perspective most people have about collaboration? It consists of blogs, wikis, discussion groups...

Isn’t workflow just a way for the enterprise to collaborate with a person (or even a system) on meeting a corporate objective?

Is agentry another example of a different type of collaboration?

Is there a collaboration model that takes into account a variety of inter-personal and inter-device techniques and objectives that could be met?

This perspective may be viewed as a bit strange, but since this is a blog - I can probably get away with it?

Published Monday, October 16, 2006 2:05 PM

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Comments

Posted by Susan Scrupski Monday, October 16, 2006 6:55 PM

Hello. I just came back from an action-packed 3 days in San Francisco at the inaugural Office 2.0 conference. There were over 50 vendors demonstrating, but there were at least 5 standouts in web 2.0 collaboration tools. In alphabetical order: Atlassian (a fave), Coghead (just announced at the conference), Itensil (my client), Teqlo (also just announced), and Intalio (Ismael Ghalemi, founder). Intalio wasn't demonstating, but has an advanced suite of BPM technology. I hope you're aware of these new products.

I like your idea of "agentry." Maybe you could expand on it?

Posted by Jim Lavin Tuesday, October 17, 2006 2:31 PM

I would expect that we will see a lot more about agent collaboration as it becomes more of a mainstream technology. If you read any of the white papers on agentry it is all about collaboration that occurs using a specific set of rules to do such things as haggle over a price with a vendor's agent or book a room with a hotel's agent.

The book Accelerando by Charles Stross depicts a world where agents perform several daily mundane tasks for the main character Manfred Macx, even though this is set in the future, his brain is augmented with a computer upgrade and its fiction, we could be seeing this happen for us in the near future with programs that run on our desktops. It is just a matter of finding the right niche where we can use agents as an extension of our everyday life. Once that happens I think you will be seeing them pop up all over the place touted as a way for us to save time.