Research today, in either the public or private sector, is increasingly a collaborative activity where work is, not only distributed between different research units, but it may involve several separate organisations each of which are in completely different time zones. Inevitably therefore, the governance of such complex research programmes will also involve many different parties who each may have different interests and authority levels.

The appropriate sharing and management of information in this context is therefore challenging, but essential for the smooth and efficient running of what may be several inter-related programmes.

Provision of a central system - available anywhere, anytime - allows content in many different formats to be shared and distributed teams to collaborate effectively..

Some general characteristics of a system that are needed to provide such a centralised facility are:

• The separation of different sets of users into Groups with appropriate permissions to use individual system facilities to different levels and to access defined content
• For defined individuals to be able to create/upload new content and to Categorise it for selective access by defined Groups of users
• For content of various types to be readily created/uploaded, i.e. individual web pages, documents and other file types, video clips, etc.

Some specific features relevant to Research Coordination are:

• The ability for various governance functions to selectively access summary information and to coordinate their various processes, e.g. the publication of minutes etc.
• For individual programme teams to be able to selectively publish their work to different Groups of users, perhaps even on a public basis for certain elements
• For other users to be able to comment on particular content when appropriate
• To be able to informally 'discuss' various topics, in either closed or open groups
• To be able to create structured contact information for all team members
• To provide regular Newsletters to various groups of users and to coordinate any public communications/PR activity
• To manage all aspects of arranging meetings and special events such as workshops: from the logistics associated with individual's attendance through to the 'chasing' and subsequent publication of presentation material

In addition, where such a Research Coordination activity is part of a wider set of processes for the management of Products & Services, the central system can evolve to support the additional Product Development and Product Management activities, as well as being integrated with other functional areas such as Marketing & Strategy, Sales & Support, etc.