Wednesday Septemer 17, we held a Future Workspaces workshop on Enterprise Social Software. Around 25 people from a broad range of organizations joined the workshop. We started of with an impressive showcase by our host, Erik Krischan (IBM), on the social tools they are using. My “yes, can we have that too, please“-moment was when he demonstrated their Intranet search: while searching for a specific topic, the system also shows the experts on the topic within the company, your social path (friend-of-a-friend) to that expert, relevant communities and of course the relevant information assets. After that presentation, Mireille Jansma (ING) gave us a brief impression of the issues people face in a less technology-minded setting when trying to introduce enterprise social software: a very good way to get us back on our feet to the reality of typical enterprise environments.

Picture by Ton Zijlstra

We then continued with a knowledge café: moderated by Mireille, we split up in groups and discussed issues and good practices around the introduction and usage of social software in an enterprise environment. During the knowledge café roundup we discussed our findings.

For me it was the first time of participating in a knowledge café and I was pleasantly surprised about the results. Thanks to the active contributions by all participants and the moderation by Mireille, we could really share knowledge and experiences, while getting to know the people behind the stories. Some points I took away from the workshop:

• Making sure that employees have control over their personal profile, especially when the system automatically tries to establish expertise areas and connections, seems to be essential for user acceptance of enterprise social software.
• Be very careful when giving a manager the role of facilitator in an online discussion: make sure your facilitator is a linking pin and can actually put in the time and effort to keep the conversation going.
• To have some insight in the benefits of enterprise social software, collect anecdotes of how people used the software to solve business issues. Any way, make sure you have statistics on the number of active users and the number of times people queried the system.

For an overview of the event, the participants and links to relevant sources, visit the workshop wiki page.

I would like to end by expressing my thanks to Erik Krischan, Mireille Jansma and all participants for their active contributions. Let’s keep the conversation going!

Tags: collective intelligence, enterprise social software, introduction, social software, usage, web2.0, workshop

Dit item is geplaatst door external author op 21 September 2008 om 19:25 in EN, team blog. Je kunt een reactie achterlaten, of een trackback op je eigen website opnemen.