Environments: A Vision for Future Project Information Technologies

Projects have long been seen as information rich environments with associated calls for information integration to support decision-making. Yet even with advanced applications based on shared data standards, project professionals still face considerable difficulty accessing needed information in a form useful for decision making. In the authors’ viewpoint, a primary reason for these difficulties is that most data and tools are designed and operated in the context of specific applications. This creates the problem of information tunnels: rich data and application areas with knowledge that is not easily transferable to other application areas. Information tunnels per se would not be a difficulty if projects had identical problems; walls between tunnels could be torn down or professionals could develop heuristic integration mechanisms that functioned with a high degree of reliability, speed, and accuracy. But each project faces unique challenges, making integration across tunnels difficult for both machines and humans. Hence, we envision information technologies that provide project professionals much greater configuration control in how they access project information, regardless of its source or tunnel. We believe user models will drive such technologies, formal structures that help capture and structure both the data and metadata that professionals use in their work. We describe a user model driven information architecture and compare how that environment might work in contrast to existing approaches