A Virtual-Community-Centric Architecture to Support Coordination in a Large Scale Distributed Environment: A Case Study of the South African Public Sector

Abstract

Coordination in a distributed environment is customarily a difficult endeavour. The work pattern that emerges owing to the complexities associated with size, autonomy, structure and geographical dispersal of the participants provides unique coordination challenges, as evidenced in the South African Public Sector. To take advantage of opportunities and maximise the utilisation of limited resources, entities are required to periodically collaborate. This denotes that the need for effective coordination and cooperative collaboration among role players is crucial, to ensure that the ineffective use of resources does not occur, through incoherence, fragmentation and the duplication of efforts. This paper presents an overview of Virtual community-centric architecture that has the potential to support and promote sustainable coordination within the South African public sector. The architecture looks to support the operations of a context-aware collaboration life cycle model geared to streamline coordination in a distributed environment from a collaborative stand point.