CERN’s contribution to industry is not limited to high technology for frontier science. Through the Scandinavian CoDisCo project, the lab is also helping to define management practice for large-scale distributed projects.
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider project represents not only the world’s largest scientific undertaking but also a unique opportunity to study project management on a global scale. The ATLAS and CMS experiments, as well as the LHC, are collaborative projects whose members, and competencies, are distributed around the world along with the suppliers providing equipment, services and raw materials. They provide ideal case-studies for the Scandinavian Connecting Distributed Competencies (CoDisCo) project.
Some companies have already begun to adapt to a global market-place, where their suppliers as well as their customers could be anywhere in the world. Internet-based information systems are enjoying a boom as companies come to rely on them more and more for document handling. Those firms that have taken the plunge report significant savings in time and money after converting from traditional paper-based document management to digital formats. Although the paperless office is almost a reality, with some three-quarters of internal document handling being done on line, companies still resort to traditional methods for their external communications and document handling.
CERN is a natural place for a distributed project management study. The physics community has already had decades to adapt itself to the realities of working with large-scale distributed collaborations. Indeed, the World Wide Web was born out of physicists’ need to communicate and share information. The LHC project, with its Engineering Data Management System, is at the vanguard of this emerging field and both the accelerator and its experiments are truly global in nature.
Funding for CoDisCo comes from the Nordisk Industrifond and seven, small and medium-sized Scandinavian companies which hope to learn from the LHC experience. The project’s goal is to define methods and tools to integrate and exploit distributed resources better by collecting distributed competencies to form a single, logical, networked entity. CoDisCo is a two-year project and was formally inaugurated with a meeting at CERN last September. Since then, three students have begun work on their theses on document management at CERN. Two partners, Aker Finnyards of Finland and Hönnun og ráðgjöf of Iceland, are already testing an Internet-based document-management system. As the project moves towards its conclusion, both industry and the increasingly global field of particle physics stand to gain.
