User-Centric Interactive Collaboration Software (UCICS)

Abstract

The problem of collaboration exists among businesses across all sectors. Teams often face collaboration challenges as a result of lack of communication, lack of appropriate collaboration tools that meet the needs, or over complexity of using collaboration tools. We attempt to solve this problem by User-Centric Interactive Collaboration Software (UCICS). The purpose of UCICS is to develop a framework that connects currently available collaboration tools, while providing a customizable user interface for viewing the data stored in those tools. Through interviews and discussions with our customer group at the Herman B Wells Center for Pediatric Research, we have determined that this need exists across the labs in in the Herman B Wells Center and IU School of Medicine. As a proof of concept prototype, we are developing a system that will allow researchers to share their mice inventory with other labs with no additional work than they are already doing to manage their mice inventory. This system has potential to save great amount of time and money for the researchers. Furthermore we plan to extend UCICS to allow researchers from different labs to collaborate and share common experiment data. Moving forward we envision USICS to be able to solve collaboration problems across all disciplines by integrating variety of tools into the framework.