Second IFCIS International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems
(CoopIS'97)

Kiawah Island, South Carolina, USA, June 24-27, 1997

Organizer:
Steve Laufmann
U S West Advanced Technologies
Boulder, Colorado

Panelists:

• Michael Brodie, GTE Laboratories Incorporated
• Lynn Dean, Idaho National Engineering & Environmental Laboratory
• Dan Ries, Symmetrix, Inc.
• Ted Rybeck, Benchmarking Partners

Discussion Theme:
Enterprise information systems are increasingly characterized by platform heterogeneity, geographical distribution, organizational dispersion, functional and semantic heterogeneity, and decentralization. In addition, these systems are increasingly being reused or retargeted to support tasks for which they were not originally designed.

These issues motivate the notion of cooperation among multiple information systems, driving commercial and government organizations toward creative new solutions, not only to the apparent technical problems, but also to the non-technical issues that surround the creation and adaptation of production-scale cooperative information systems.

This panel will focus on the experiences of real-world practitioners of cooperative information systems:

• What technical approaches have been tried?
• What were the practical limitations of these approaches?
• What organizational, financial, or other nontechnical constraints have been encountered, and how have these been dealt with?
• What has worked, and what hasn't?