Characterizing an Information Technology Centric Mechanism to Support Coordination in a Large Scale Distributed Environment

Abstract

Organizations constantly face challenges owing to limited resources. As such, to take advantage of new opportunities and to mitigate possible risks they look for new ways to cooperate and collaborate, by sharing knowledge and competencies. The segmented South African (SA) public sector is no different in that to ensure proper service delivery in the sector, various agencies must work together towards the attainment of common goals. Thus, coordination among partners is critical in order to achieve success. However, this is not easy, the lack of coordination and its impact on current initiatives continuous to be a problem in the SA public sector given the complexity associated with the heterogeneous and distributed nature of the environment. Thus, the need to develop an Information System (IS) that is integrative and dynamic to accommodate the varying coordination needs across the distribute environment. This theoretical paper conceived from an extensive literature study, and a comparative analysis guided by case study analysis explores lessons from existing theories and technologies that focus on facilitating coordination towards defining a criteria for the design of an IS that can adequately support the coordination of cooperative work that exists in a large scale distributed environment.