Insights collaboration space: a team collaboration app for the design of data-driven services

Next to technical expertise, the ability to effectively communicate and collaborate with a large number of different stakeholders with varying technical backgrounds has always been one of the vital skills of good software architects. So far, software architects have had to mainly interact with domain experts, UX designers, managers, testers, operators, and developers, with developers being one of the most important stakeholder groups for them. In the future, we believe, there will be a new group of stakeholders equally important to developers: data scientists. So the ability to effectively communicate and collaborate with data scientists will become a paramount skill of software architects. Data-driven services will be a large driver for innovation and new business models in the upcoming years. However, the design of those services in a quality that is acceptable to users will require much closer collaboration of the different disciplines than in traditional software engineering projects. In terms of software engineering, it is crucial to facilitate this challenging cross-disciplinary collaboration in the best possible way. As a result of a research cooperation between John Deere and Fraunhofer IESE, we contribute the ICSpace app, an insights collaboration space for cross-disciplinary teams jointly working on the design of data-driven services.