News - Shared workspace
Shared workspace
August 2002
The Shared Workspace Design project has been gathering "lessons learned" from a range of online workspaces that government agencies use or run now. We have been talking to members of the e-GIF project, Standards New Zealand, LINZ Public Works Act Review group, and the Treasury, because they run or have started using online collaboration for cross-agency work.
We have learned that having a shared workspace for government would deliver a simple range of benefits:
- Benefits to individuals - one place for all members to get the project documents and meeting updates instead of storing them in many e-mails. Workspaces do not replace meetings but they support networking between meetings.
- Benefits to agencies - increased security of what is exchanged; reduced need to own and support workspace infrastructure; the sharing of costly research and library resources; a common approach to online workspace security and protocols; and the reduced need for learning a wide variety of software. If the workspace is kept online as a record of what was learned, it can be re-used by another team at a later time.
We understand there are new cross-agency projects starting up that would benefit from something like a shared workspace. If you are in this category now or are likely to be, we would appreciate knowing about your situation. Right now we are assessing what future demand is going to be and how worthwhile this project is: if you have not already talked to us, please do so soon! Call Ros Coote 495 6752 (ros.coote@ssc.govt.nz).
