Collaborative Scheduling over the Internet

The modern global economy compels people to communicate, collaborate, and cooperate efficiently. To date, information technology has facilitated this communication and collaboration by making the transfer of information quicker and more efficient through the use of digital and computer communications. However, it is argued that the efficient transfer of information is not enough; people still must coordinate their decisions based on the information exchanged. There is always the danger that the volume of information and the pace at which the information is exchanged will overwhelm the people, and they will not realize the implications of their decisions based on this information. This is especially so when the information exchange is across organizational boundaries. Computer support for such decision coordination is still very much lacking. This article looks at the subject of decision coordination in a very task‐specific area, that of precast fabrication scheduling. It discusses the issues involved and describes the proposed system model for implementing a groupware application for doing distributed scheduling. It also discusses the technology that will be used to implement the application.