This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project investigates techniques and supporting mechanisms for visualizing enterprises. Understanding how enterprises operate is no simple endeavor. Many people who operate small businesses do so without the benefit of a formal education in information systems, organizational or process design. Similarly, people often lack the know-how needed to identify, diagnose and rectify problems in workflow, resource allocation, or business-to-business relationships. A survey, conducted by the firm, of related research indicates that little attention has been directed at understanding how to best visualize or visually represent organizational operations, structures, or processes. Thus, the basic problem for this research effort is, what constitutes an effective approach to visually represent the operations, structures and processes within an enterprise, or between interacting enterprises. The project will investigate, prototype and demonstrate a new approach and supporting mechanisms for visualizing enterprises, starting with a computer game environment, through a two phase research effort. This is to be followed by a third phase of full-scale product development and commercialization.
