KEY ACTION 2 - NEW METHODS OF WORK AND ELECTRONIC COMMERCE

1. Work and Business in the Information Society
2. Human Workspaces
3. Multi-Location Collaborative Working
4. Dynamic Virtual Enterprise Management
5. Digital Development of Intelligent Goods & Services
6. Life-cycle Support for Customer-Product Relationships
7. Electronic Trade & Service
8. Organisational Learning & Knowledge Management
9. Business and Industry Operations Experiments & Best Practice
10. Acceptable Security Architectures
11. High Reliability Components, System & Services
12. Dependable Network Environments
13. Digital Object Life-cycle Management

Rationale for Action Lines

The individual in the information society, both as a worker and as a consumer, wherever they happen to be, is being confronted with new opportunities and challenges in the work-space and the market-space.

In the global network economy successful organisations constantly shift the boundaries of their operations and collaborations, re-invent existing activities, and exploit completely new business models and markets. The economy thus becomes a dispersed network where organisations rely more and more on external parties in other regions and other time-zones to produce goods and services, to conduct business and to reach their customers.

There are fundamental changes underlying what is now being produced, bought and sold. The information content of physical goods is increasing dramatically and represents a significant, if not dominant, component of cost. Intelligence is being added to goods through embedded and networked computers. Goods are also being replaced by services. Services in turn are becoming more intelligent.

Within new market configurations and dynamics, business and industry will benefit in terms of more effective trading relations, easier and shorter access to new markets, more efficient operations, and ability to innovate and customise products and services. Consumers should benefit from higher quality products being available more widely, more quickly, and at lower cost. SME’s and individual entrepreneurs are key parties of the network economy because each party can bring their very specialised capabilities to the global marketplace. They will no longer be locked into one supply chain but can more easily enter, at an earlier stage, and participate in several configurations.

Individuals - as workers and consumers – and organisations - business and industrial enterprises and the service industries - need support from secure, scalable and interoperable, dynamic and distributed IST application components and services. Information security mechanisms, technologies, services and applications, whether tightly integrated into other specific processes or services or being effectively viewed as independent, are essential pre-conditions to achieving the equitable relationships that support a healthy work space and a healthy market space. The new IST solutions will allow everyone to participate, to collaborate and to learn, to work and to trade in the networked world, and to produce and to use the new goods and the new services that will be the basis of the future economy.

Work and Business in the Information Society: Socio-economic research is required in this key action to extend knowledge about the social, legal, market and regulatory context in which organisations, individuals and new methods of work and doing business are developing. The results of this research must be integrated into the whole programme, as socio-economic aspects must be taken onto account in the development and take-up of new ICT solutions to ensure appropriateness. The models and paradigms developed within the key action will help identify areas where legislation and regulation may need to evolve to fit the new work and consumer practices. The research in this area will be undertaken both within projects and action lines, which have a specific need for socio-economic component, and at key action level where generic issues can be addressed.

The required flexible, mobile and remote working methods and tools will be addressed across several action lines:

• Human Workspaces: Within emerging organisational paradigms it is important to ensure that the needs of individual workers are taken into account and that ICT is used to enrich rather than de-humanise working life
• Multi-Location Collaborative Working: From an operational and functional viewpoint, individuals, teams and organisations, need flexible, richer and shared working environments to support telework and networked collaboration.
• Dynamic Virtual Enterprise Management: Business networks and system structures and activities need to change rapidly at various levels in response to new market requirements and opportunities

The new processes, involving as they do business-to-business, business-to-worker, business-to-consumer and business-to-administration interactions, clearly imply new management systems for suppliers and consumers:

• Digital Development of Intelligent Goods & Services: For design, engineering and maintenance processes, the focus is on the use of fully digital product models and mock-ups, covering physical goods, including those with embedded services, and new or re-engineered services.
• Life-cycle Support for Customer-Product Relationships: For marketing, logistics and support processes, the focus is on the service enhancement or replacement of products in their supply to the consumer through design for product life-cycle support
• Electronic Trade & Service: For processes related to market and trading places, focus is on identifying suitable business models and processes for the full commercial transaction cycle of distributed electronic trading, pulling forward traditional processes into new trading processes, and offering integrated solutions with intelligent user-friendly interfaces and transparent connections between application components and services

There are issues that cut across the workspace and the market-space:

• Organisational Learning & Knowledge Management: The importance of intellectual assets is recognised by support for the enhanced incorporation of learning into new business and industrial structures, processes and operations
• Business and Industry Operations Experiments & Best Practice: To stimulate take-up of new structures, processes and operations in business and industry, in particular in SME’s, it will be beneficial to bring together experiments to facilitate the transfer of the new ways in which organisations and individuals organise themselves and co-operate

The new spaces and the new relationships need to be supported through the application of appropriate information security technologies:

• Acceptable Security Architectures: To support a just and democratic information society the aim must be to encourage equitable security solutions, acceptable to all the actors within specific application environments
• High Reliability Components, System & Services: The economic provision of trustworthy information implies the application and incorporation of a variety of security techniques and procedures into the various components involved .in the communications infrastructure, the service environment, the enterprise network, and the user space
• Dependable Network Environments: The simple availability of communication networks is a prerequisite for all of the services and applications considered. The increasing economic vulnerability of businesses to potential major communications infrastructure failure needs to be addressed by the organisations themselves
• Digital Object Life-cycle Management. Services whether towards the consumer or as supplied by an individual teleworker to a client or simply as a basis for inter-working between trading partners will be based to a significant extent on the transfer of digital objects

At this stage the following areas are candidates for Cross-programme themes. In some Key Action II would play a co-ordinating and integrating role, in others, Key Action II would be a contributing partner:

• Security and Safety
• Mobility - Flexibility in Space & Time
• Customer Interaction
• Multi-functional Access Devices
• Application Integration Frameworks
• Virtual Spaces & Communities
• Embedded Services/Networks
• Socio-Economic Aspects

1. Work and Business in the Information Society

Monitorable RTD objective(s):

The objectives of this action line are:

• to extend knowledge and promote awareness about the social, legal, market and regulatory context in which organisations, individuals and new methods of work and doing business are developing, in order to better inform business and governmental support for their future development and ultimate take-up on the market, and
• to help measure the impact of the more specific, technological R&D actions of related action lines.

Some of the research will be undertaken within specific action lines, some will be generic to the whole key action.

The scope includes research on:

• the employment impact of new methods of work and doing business in terms of new job opportunities and the changing nature of work
• the nature and extent of organisational change related to the uptake of ICT, in particular changes in external and internal relationships, legislation for ‘virtual organisations’ regarding ownership, liability and performance measures, implications for labour markets, and customer service, and the bottlenecks to the uptake of new methods of work
• the ethical and legal issues, including social exclusion, employment conditions, product liability, IPR, and privacy, related to the increased use of ICT in organisation, work and trading
• the impact of interaction between different cultures on the success for new collaborative working methods and global electronic trading
• the skills, training, managerial and competitiveness implications of the introduction of new working methods based on ICT; in addition the changes in the skills requirements of organisations should be investigated with a view to forecasting future skills requirements and training needs of workers and management
• the social, legal and organisational implications of distance working, both for workers and for management, including the new relationship between working and private life
• the current and expected uptake of new electronic trading and servicing business models and applications, the implications for trading relations, market development and consumer choice, and the barriers to adoption.

In addition to these issues individual action lines may develop specific research on issues of relevance, such as market developments, economic impact studies, developments in competitor regions etc. It is important that such research is co-ordinated, however, to avoid repeat studies and ensure that as many people as possible profit from the new knowledge.

The results of this research must be integrated into the whole programme, as socio-economic aspects must be taken onto account in the development and take-up of new ICT solutions to ensure appropriateness.

The research will be completed through mechanisms that will be put in place to assist in identifying where legal and regulatory frameworks may need to evolve because of potential new work and consumer practices.

Individual actions’ progress will be measured on the basis of their aims and on the basis of their impact on the more specific, technological R&D actions of related action lines and on the wider policy development.

Overall progress can be judged from the extent to which new knowledge is created and disseminated. This dissemination process will be facilitated through the organisation of internal and external seminars and conferences. Progress will be evaluated in an on-going manner throughout the life of the programme through collaborative events bringing together socio-economic and technological projects for discussion and debate.

Main type of action: Qualitative and quantitative research including statistics, surveys and simulations.

Specific Evaluation Criteria:

Expected Call Dates: see Annex I

Annotations:
Economic and Social Benefits:
European Dimension:
Relative priority & Expected Budget Share: see Annex I
Progress/Impact Monitoring:

2. Human Workspaces

Monitorable RTD objective(s):

The objective of this action line is to integrate, evaluate and validate flexible solutions that recognise the human roles in new organisational paradigms and take into account natural human behaviour in how we work, learn, create and interact with each other.

The target is to demonstrate:

• innovative and creative solutions that incorporate human aspects like skill, trust, learning, communication, team organisation and decision making into the integration of ICT in the workplaces
• the degree to which solutions integrate into the human structure and behaviour that already exist in business, making new ICT increasingly invisible
• the increased flexibility in space, time and organisation for the individual worker due to more effective mobile workspaces
• the increase of effectiveness due to better workspace design and assimilation of ICT into the workplace

The scope includes:

• workspace design, incorporating usability, ergonomics and the consideration of human factors
  • work and business object human interface design and human systems interfaces, including ‘design-for-all’ concepts
  • human-centred interactive communications, including multi-disciplinary, cross-cultural and multi-lingual issues
• assimilating new ICT into existing workplaces and –styles
• mobile workspaces, including the use of virtual reality, wearables and personal assistants
• human aspects of enterprise integration and (re-)engineering

Main type of action: integration and adaptation, validation, demonstration

Specific Evaluation Criteria:

Expected Call Dates: see Annex I

Annotations:
Economic and Social Benefits:
European Dimension:
Relative priority & Expected Budget Share: see Annex I
Progress/Impact Monitoring:

3. Multi-Location Collaborative Working

Monitorable RTD objective(s):

The objective of this action line is to develop and integrate application components that support the flexible collaboration and communication between individuals, teams and organisations at different locations.

The targets are:

• to provide pseudo-realistic, shared virtual working environments that exploit emerging technologies for real time, multi-sensory, interactive collaboration between multi-disciplinary, cross-cultural and multi-lingual individuals, teams and organisations situated at different, possibly mobile, locations
• to maximise their integration into the different working and management environments ensuring that also the needs of mobile workers, individual teleworkers, entrepreneurship and portfolio workers and SME’s are taken into account
• to validate solutions and demonstrate their contribution to decreased time to market, reduced R&D and product development costs, and optimised bid preparation by shortened interaction loops, more extensive use of shared information, and better workforce cohesion and solidarity

The scope includes:

• development and integration of application components into environments that enable sharing, reuse, manipulation and integration of project-related data, models, equipment, standards, applications and presentations and joint participation in the associated business and industrial processes, involving in particular
  • integration of heterogeneous network connections and system configurations, including the ones for mobile workers
  • integration of synchronous with asynchronous working
  • mixed interface design, including cross-cultural and multi-lingual issues
• combination of shared workspaces with the overall, distributed workflow management
• control and management of rights, liabilities, non-disclosure and security issues
• research on group dynamics and human resources management

Main type of action: R&D, integration and adaptation, validation, demonstration

Specific Evaluation Criteria:

Expected Call Dates: see Annex I

Annotations:
Economic and Social Benefits:
European Dimension:
Relative priority & Expected Budget Share: see Annex I
Progress/Impact Monitoring:

4. Dynamic Virtual Enterprise Management

Monitorable RTD objective(s):

The objective of this action line is to develop and integrate application configurations that enable businesses to dynamically network and manage multiple partnerships, resources and processes in order to satisfy new requests and exploit new business opportunities.

The targets are:

• to help business managers to rapidly change business network structures and activities, enabling constant shifting of the boundaries of co-operation and the adoption of tighter or looser co-ordination and interaction, as in ‘extended and virtual organisations’
• to validate solutions and demonstrate their contribution to improved overall, rather than local, business network performance through faster, more accurate, lower cost processes

In particular, the integration of SME’s into business networks will be facilitated.

The scope includes:

• integration frameworks and tools that allow matching, customisation and re-configuration, and inter-operation of application components in business networks
• application component definition (meta-)languages, semantics and behaviour defining architectures and reference models for business and organisational aspects
• strategic and tactical decision support for forecasting and change and risk management, and tools for distributed, collaborative decision making
• tools for establishing or activating, integrating and (re-)engineering, and managing and controlling multiple, dynamic business partnerships, including systems for on-line business information search and management, services to search for and select appropriate partners and resources, enterprise integration and engineering, and services to manage negotiations and agreements
• active, real time support for a variety of ways in which processes and collaborations operate within and between businesses; companies may operate in hierarchical and flattened structures and in network structures with relatively autonomous nodes; and operations may be centralised, distributed and co-operative.
• help in the integration and (re-)engineering of value networks and in the real time co-ordination and interaction of concurrent and shared business processes and associated distributed order-, work- and ownership-flows
• facilities for dynamic, distributed, concurrent and co-operative planning, scheduling and real time re-scheduling of networked resources, including applications that combine and make available interrelated pieces of information distributed across processes and sites, for tracking of status across the network
• enterprise transformation tools, to support continuously changing processes, flows and activities in hybrid environments
• integration with operational information and communication systems
• support for personnel management and guidance
• support for metrics definition, benchmarking, productivity measurement, quality control and cost management in the context of dynamic organisations
• modelling and simulation of and experimentation with new organisational models, business process models and product life-cycle models, including the ‘build-to-order’ cycle

Main type of action: R&D, integration and adaptation, validation, demonstration

Specific Evaluation Criteria:

Expected Call Dates: see Annex I

Annotations:
Economic and Social Benefits:
European Dimension:
Relative priority & Expected Budget Share: see Annex I
Progress/Impact Monitoring:

5. Digital Development of Intelligent Goods & Services

Monitorable RTD objective(s):

The objective of this action line is to develop and integrate new or re-engineered ways of developing products based on fully digital product models and mock-ups, covering physical goods, including those with embedded services, and new or re-engineered services.

The target is to validate solutions and demonstrate the contribution to the ability of business and industry to deliver optimised, more accurate and intelligent goods and services, faster and at lower cost.

The scope includes:

• the introduction of innovative modelling, simulation, optimisation and virtual reality-based work methods for design, prototyping, testing, engineering and maintenance of goods and services
• the embedding of intelligence and networked computers into products and the de-materialisation of products into information services
• analysis and assessment of value associated with the various features of a product or service, and simulation of subjective value models
• the integration of those methods into distributed development processes, work flows and shared workspaces, involving also the links to partners
• the access to coherent product and process information through the full product life-cycle
• distributed configuration management, change control and data management for sharing product and process information

Main type of action: R&D, integration and adaptation, validation, demonstration

Specific Evaluation Criteria:

Expected Call Dates: see Annex I

Annotations:
Economic and Social Benefits:
European Dimension:
Relative priority & Expected Budget Share: see Annex I
Progress/Impact Monitoring:

6. Life-cycle Support for Customer-Product Relationships

Monitorable RTD objective(s):

The objective of this action line is to develop and integrate application components that offer new ways for producers, suppliers and the related service industry to manage marketing, sales, logistics and support activities.

The target is to validate solutions and demonstrate their impact on the ability of business and industry to tailor products and services to the needs of individual customers, to provide customer driven delivery and to design for product life-cycle support with maximised service and minimised cost of ownership or access for the customer.

The scope includes:

• the integration of customer information across product lines and interaction channels
• customer behaviour profiling and analysis for marketing and sales
• modular product concepts to enable customer design
• the design and use of new supply and delivery channels and dynamics
• optimised and co-managed inventory and distribution control, including personalised customer access to inventory and customer tracking of distribution status
• embedding of intelligent components into products for on-line service management and automatic support features
• mechanisms for reverse logistics, including recycling and disposal

Main type of action: R&D, integration and adaptation, validation, demonstration

Specific Evaluation Criteria:

Expected Call Dates: see Annex I

Annotations:
Economic and Social Benefits:
European Dimension:
Relative priority & Expected Budget Share: see Annex I
Progress/Impact Monitoring:

7. Electronic Trade & Service

Monitorable RTD objective(s):

The objectives of this action line are:

• to integrate the various marketplaces, players and activities for electronic trading and servicing environments, to simulate and experiment with different business models, and to broaden the use and spread the benefits of trading and servicing electronically, including to SME’s, individual entrepreneurs and the final consumer, and
• to develop and integrate application components that offer new ways for organisations and individuals to provide and access information about what to buy, who to buy from, and how to determine transaction terms, including payment, delivery and servicing options.

The targets are:

• to contribute to the development of new business models and tools for multi-party electronic trading and servicing, and
• to validate solutions and to demonstrate their impact on customer benefits in terms of wider choice, quicker response, lower cost, higher quality, and more personalised products, and on supplier benefits in terms of more effective trading relations, easier and shorter access to new markets, more efficient and thus cheaper operations, and ability to innovate and customise products.

The scope includes:

• simulation and experimentation with different business models for integrated electronic trading and servicing environments with different combinations of buyers, sellers, intermediaries, goods, services and communication channels
• pulling forward traditional functions and legacy applications into the new trading and delivery processes
• support for building and maintaining ‘virtual marketplaces’ and for organising ‘virtual/on-line trading communities’, including applications for ‘micro-markets’, ‘dynamic ad-hoc markets’ and the new commodities such as processing power and communication capacity
• support for customer-interaction functions, exploring the adaptation of presentation and interaction features of entertainment to electronic trade, with the aim to offer integrated solutions with natural language, multi-lingual and cross-cultural user-friendly interfaces and transparent connections between application components and services:
  • adaptation of multi-functional, non-PC based access devices, appliances and user interfaces, and marketing channel integration
  • interaction with electronic trading places and players in a personalised fashion, tailoring assistance to customers’ knowledge, tasks, needs and preferences, and allowing customers to configure/package the goods or service by themselves
  • advertising, promoting, searching and locating information about organisations and their goods and services, including use of pull, push and filtering technologies and cross-directory and –catalogue services such as distributed content-based, semantic searches and navigation
  • comparing and evaluating alternatives, including the provision of market intelligence, and support to reach decisions about what to buy from whom, based on subjective as well as objective criteria and goals, and informed by analyses of trends in goods and services
  • making and responding to an offer and matching supply with demand, including agent-based capacity brokerage and goal-oriented negotiation
  • use of information from customer interactions to feed back into other business processes, including customer behaviour profiling and analysis.
• support for back-office functions
  • determining the terms of transactions, including both macro- and micro-transactions and short- and long-term transactions
  • ordering, billing and payment, and accounting
  • support for contracting identification, agreement, and execution
  • legal process management and re-engineering in multi-legal environments with possibly bypassing traditional legal intermediaries
  • interfacing with administrations, including for procurements and for customs and tax affairs and statistics
  • delivering, and supporting, goods and services according to contract

Both tangible/physical goods, intangible goods, such as multimedia content, software, IPR's and brand names, and services should be considered.

Main type of action: R&D, integration and adaptation, validation, demonstration, experimentation, best practice pilots, dissemination and awareness actions

Specific Evaluation Criteria:

Expected Call Dates: see Annex I

Annotations:
Economic and Social Benefits:
European Dimension:
Relative priority & Expected Budget Share: see Annex I
Progress/Impact Monitoring:

8. Organisational Learning & Knowledge Management

Monitorable RTD objective(s):

The objectives of this action line are to facilitate the integration of learning into business processes within and between organisations of all sizes, and to validate the economical and social benefits experienced by user organisations.

The targets are:

• to enable organisations to better nurture, organise and exploit their distributed knowledge assets
• to raise individuals’ employability by increasing their flexibility in coping with new roles in their work and by raising their ability to learn from their experience, broadening their role and fostering their knowledge and skills
• to help to reduce the learning curve, matching individuals' aspiration with organisational constraints and objectives, stimulating creativity and innovation
• to assess and demonstrate the contribution to
  • the economic benefits (quality, time to market, reduced learning curve costs, innovation rate, etc) experienced by user organisations, e.g. through action reporting requirements or through specific surveys
  • the social benefits to employees and managers e.g. by monitoring employee satisfaction and retention levels.

The scope includes:

• capturing experience and knowledge from employees into (inter-)corporate memories and (distributed) knowledge repositories
• the organisation of memories and repositories, including access control mechanisms allowing multiple views of the same knowledge
• use of navigation, search, filtering and presentation facilities for knowledge repositories, both corporate and individual
• knowledge sharing, re-use and distribution across locations and between organisations
• incorporation of learning into business processes through the identification of ‘communities of practice’, going beyond the transformation of information flows into knowledge flows
• equipping individuals and teams with access to all the knowledge and skills required to successfully perform their tasks
• natural integration of continuous learning into business processes to enable the transition to new practices and behaviours
• tools to monitor and evaluate the quality and value of learning efforts and intangible assets

Main type of action: R&D, integration and adaptation, validation, demonstration

Specific Evaluation Criteria:

Expected Call Dates: see Annex I

Annotations:
Economic and Social Benefits:
European Dimension:
Relative priority & Expected Budget Share: see Annex I
Progress/Impact Monitoring:

9. Business and Industry Operations Experiments & Best Practice

Monitorable RTD objective(s):

The objective of this action line is to broaden the use of the new ways in which organisations and individuals structure themselves and operate.

The target is to stimulate the participation of a critical mass of SME's in experiments that will demonstrate applicability and benefits of introducing new integrated ICT in support of business operations.

The scope includes:

• simulations and experiments aimed at following and changing best practice by highlighting and removing business, technical or social barriers to effective and efficient technology implementation
• service provision to help the monitoring, awareness creation, transfer and uptake of experience and knowledge
• user groups and working groups

Each action may be carried out on a European, national or regional level, possibly facilitated by regional technology transfer centres. Transfer is not only from European to national/regional level, but also from national/regional to European or between regions.

Main type of action: experimentation, best practice pilots, dissemination and awareness actions

Specific Evaluation Criteria:

Expected Call Dates: see Annex I

Annotations:

Examples of best practice will be disseminated with a view to spreading the benefits of new technology by fostering a more effective and practical approach to business and industry structures and operations.

Economic and Social Benefits:
European Dimension:
Relative priority & Expected Budget Share: see Annex I
Progress/Impact Monitoring:

10. Acceptable Security Architectures

Monitorable RTD objective(s):

The objective of this line of action is to supply the architectures and protocols that will support the identification and authentication necessary in new environments in ways that are acceptable to the actors involved and especially the people involved, whether as individual workers or consumers

The technologies and services will include those related to:

• equitable multi-role personal identification and authentication tools, protocols and supporting environments.
• privacy retaining access management architectures for very large and evolving configurations / structures / populations.
• identification and authentication mechanisms and architectures for identity rich configurations
• privacy-enhanced and anonymous brokerage and mediation technologies and payment architectures
• forensic processes, non-repudiation

Main type of action: R&D, integration and adaptation, validation, demonstration

Specific Evaluation Criteria:

Expected Call Dates: see Annex I

Annotations: The network environment is going to become significantly much richer and denser as more and more computer power is embedded in common items and these are then made network-aware. More and more devices will be effectively connected to what is effectively the one open global network. Agents will move in turn between these devices to provide added services. These will all require various forms of identification and authentication technology to be able supply their full potential. Individuals and organisations that wish or need to take advantage of this rich new network will also need a range of authentication tools to allow the various forms of interaction to take place.

Security is often see as a common responsibility but the priorities of the different actors, and in particular their individual capacity to invest, are almost always quite dissimilar. Solutions to the continual need for identification and authentication across very many transactions will need to be implemented such that they do not threaten personal privacy, they are not seen to be providing undesirable levels of control and oversight in the workspace and that they allow for equitable dispute resolution.

Economic and Social Benefits:
European Dimension:
Relative priority & Expected Budget Share: see Annex I
Progress/Impact Monitoring:

11. High Reliability Components, System & Services

Monitorable RTD objective(s):

The objective in this line of action is to enable the production of high reliability components, systems, services and applications.

The technologies and services will include those related to:

• high integrity components, amenable where appropriate to third party verification.
• components for payment systems, including micro-payments.
• self-authenticating components
• self-monitoring, tamper proofing.
• biometrics, particularly in personal tokens.
• formal methods, proofs and reliability metrics.

Main type of action: R&D, integration and adaptation, validation, demonstration

Specific Evaluation Criteria: see Annex I

Expected Call Dates:

Annotations:

While security is oft said to be pervasive the detailed requirements of individuals and organisations vary. Some information, some roles, some functions, some environments simply demand higher levels of security . With the use of appropriate mechanisms and with a minimum reliance on the security available in the communication channels it is still possible to provide these higher levels of security. The development of the specific security items and services necessary requires particular approaches.

Economic and Social Benefits:
European Dimension:
Relative priority & Expected Budget Share: see Annex I
Progress/Impact Monitoring:

12. Dependable Network Environments

Monitorable RTD objective(s):

The objective in this line of action will be to reduce the economic vulnerability of business communities to failure in the overall communications infrastructure.

The technologies and services will include those related to:

• local loop survivability
• user service monitoring
• self-healing structures – services and applications
• forensic security

Main type of action: R&D, integration and adaptation, validation, demonstration

Specific Evaluation Criteria:

Expected Call Dates: see Annex I

Annotations:

The increasing economic dependence of organisations, neighbourhoods, regions on the common communication networks presents them with a significant fundamental vulnerability in the event of a general network infrastructure failure whether due to a deliberate act or a natural disaster or even a basic system or component weakness. While work will be done elsewhere on general communication channel dependability, including quality of service issues, the work here will concentrate on the additional and complementary aspects related to individual workers and organisations who have particular dependencies.

Economic and Social Benefits:
European Dimension:
Relative priority & Expected Budget Share: see Annex I
Progress/Impact Monitoring:

13. Digital Object Life-cycle Management

Monitorable RTD objective(s):

The objective of this line of action is to provide and validate the security mechanisms and structures necessary to address the growing need to manage the common security attributes of transferable digital objects.

The technologies and services will include those related to:

• mechanisms for assuring information integrity and authentication and information labelling
• requirements for object uniqueness and inherent value
• tamperproof and labelled environments, including personal tokens.
• technologies and services for supporting information ownership - establishing and transferring ownership
• evolution strategies
• transfer protocols that meet requirements for privacy enhancement, including anonymity and untraceability
• information destruction
• anti-fraud technologies, including watermarking and fingerprinting

Main type of action: R&D, integration and adaptation, validation, demonstration

Specific Evaluation Criteria:

Expected Call Dates: see Annex I

Annotations:

Services whether towards the consumers or as supplied by an individual teleworker to a client or simply as a basis for inter-working between trading partners will be based to a significant extent on the transfer of digital objects. These may take various forms, from being effectively stand-alone and potentially reusable items to being short-lived tokens and certificates that provide access to other information and services. These objects, independently of their content and application, share common life-cycle requirements related to their authenticity and transferability: authentication and labelling, personalisation, transfer, destruction.

Economic and Social Benefits:
European Dimension:
Relative priority & Expected Budget Share: see Annex I
Progress/Impact Monitoring:

Annex I: Relative priority & Expected Budget Share + Expected Call Dates

Annex II: "Relevant Fiches"

Available as separate XL file

Annex III: Some Recent Background Material

…
"e-Commerce + Work Components" Workshops, December ’97 – April ’98
"Business Visions" Workshop, April ’98
TBP/IIM Advisory Panel Meeting, April ’98
"Trust & Confidence + Dependability" Workshops, December ’97 – March ’98
IIM User Groups Workshops, ‘97-‘98
US/NIST/ATP Workshop, March ’98
…

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