KoMiK – Digital Cooperation Systems for SMEs: Innovative Communication and Cooperation in Digital Work

In the knowledge economy, communication is the currency. What might sound like sloganeering has a very tangible reality for both SMEs and large enterprises behind it: As business operations become more and more complex and the monolithic companies of yesterday are beginning to lose their clearly demarcated boundaries in countless types of partnerships, consortia, project, workgroups, or cooperation ventures, a breakdown in communication or inefficiencies in collaboration can mean business opportunities lost, productive assets going idle, or simply money wasted.

Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS) provide a technological answer for this new type of complexity. The KoMiK project was set up to explore what businesses require and how they can employ ECS to benefit fully from the collaborative potential of the modern business world.

General Goals of KoMiK

The KoMiK project explored and reveald the requirements, influencing forces, and success factors for a working ECS system in industry in a detailed longitudinal study. Its proposed screening tool surveys procedural and technological aspects as well as softer factors, including the acceptance of technology, communication, and training as well as the upskilling of the users. From the resulting set of specifications, a working ECS could be selected and introduced at Wibu-Systems to monitor and analyze the impact and take-up of the technology in practice:

How will the ECS affect business processes and communication?
Which technical, procedural, and educational factors influence the acceptance, perception, and competent use of the ECS?
Which requirements affect the introduction, use, formalization, and continuous upgrading of the system?
Does the ECS system have a measurable effect on processes, access to information, individual workloads and complexity, greater productivity, and an improved corporate cultural experience?

The Contribution of Wibu-Systems

As the chosen application partner for the KoMiK project, Wibu-Systems has chosen to spearhead the process from the requirements analysis to the practical implementation and assessment of the working system:

Contributing to qualitative and quantitative analyses of requirements and processes.
Defining the requirements and selecting a target ECS.
Coordinating the introduction of the chosen EC and supporting on-going research with feedback and interim evaluations.
Documenting the results and contributing to academic and public communication on the project.

Achievements and Publication

After three years of concerted efforts by the partners, the KoMiK project was brought to a successful conclusion in May 2022, producing invaluable insights to facilitate the transition into new IT-driven collaborative ways of working and Enterprise Collaboration Systems at SMEs. These include actionable recommendations for practitioners in the field to help them survey the baseline situation before introducing an ECS as well as a tool of particular hands-on value for businesses: A dedicated screening tool to support ECS selection using specific case information and desired feature specifications in an easy-to-navigate filtering process. Beyond these tangible and immediately applicable results, the KoMiK project’s findings are also communicated to share the insights beyond the participating enterprises.

Results presented at the WissProKMU event on 28 April 2022.