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ObjectivesIn this paper, integrated care in an inter-organisational cooperative setting of in-home elderly care is studied. The aim is to explore how home care workers coordinate their daily work, identify coordination issues in situ and discuss possible actions for supporting seamless and integrated elderly care at home.MethodThe empirical findings are drawn from an ethnographic workplace study of the cooperation and coordination taking place between home care workers in a Swedish county. Data were collected through observational studies, interviews and group discussions.FindingsThe paper identifies a need to support two core issues. Firstly, it must be made clear how the care interventions that are currently defined as ‘self-treatment’ by the home health care should be divided. Secondly, the distributed and asynchronous coordination between all care workers involved, regardless of organisational belonging must be better supported.ConclusionIntegrated care needs to be developed between organisations as well as within each organisation. As a matter of fact, integrated care needs to be built up beyond organisational boundaries. Organisational boundaries affect the planning of the division of care interventions, but not the coordination during the home care process. During the home care process, the main challenge is the coordination difficulties that arise from the fact that workers are distributed in time and/or space, regardless of organisational belonging. A core subject for future practice and research is to develop IT tools that reach beyond formal organisational boundaries and processes while remaining adaptable in view of future structure changes.

This paper explores the current context of collaboration between small local food producers.The aim is to facilitate the design and maintenance of trustworthy collaborative e-marketplaces containing clusters of SMEs. An ethnographic approach was used and data was collected through observations, interviews and questionnaires. Our findings reveal both drivers to exploit and barriers to harness enabling trustworthy collaboration. Our current test bed is based on a research and design context that lacks mechanisms for governance. To take full advantage of the drivers and to tackle the barriers in a fruitful way, there is a need for a flexible infrastructure that allow for structured requirements, contractual agreements and validation of proposed collaboration services. To address this, we take advantage of recent developments in cloud computing, more specifically the integration of Platform as a Service (PaaS) in the support system.

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