1. Social Media Market – a workshop in which we take you and your team through the current Social Media landscape and explore which of these fit your needs and preferences.
2. Social Media Hands-on – a pilot in which you and your team experiment with a social tool of your choice. Apart from enabling and facilitating the use of the tool, we help you in gathering lessons learned and in assessing whether this tool actually provides added value for your team.
3. Social Media Strategic Advice – an independent, realistic advice on what social media could mean for your organization in relation to the business issues you are faced with. This series of activities help you to gain insight in whether or not to apply social media, how to introduce these tools in your organization and how to help your people use these tools in a smart and responsible way.

This line of activities is also a good way of getting to know us and our way of working: with a clear objective, timeline and budget we work together with you to achieve results and learn along the way. And hopefully raise your interest in broader research on future ways of working.

The decision process that was central in the experiment focused on a spatial decision problem. A team had to make a decision on the use of a vacant piece of land situated in an urban area. The virtual world of Second Life was used to create a virtual image of an urban area.

Group Decision Making in Second Life

Participants in the experiment were 240 students of Business Administration, randomly assigned to teams of 3 persons. Participants were unaware of who their team mates were as they were placed in different rooms.

Based on information they were given beforehand, teams were asked to decide what to do with the vacant piece of land. After reaching their decision, they were asked to fill out a survey in which a number of relevant variables concerning their interaction and decision making were measured. The results provide a number of interesting insights into the added value of virtual worlds for distributed group decision making, in terms of both interaction and decision quality. As the experiment will be continued in 2009 with people working in organizations, we cannot provide any more information on the results here – unfortunately…

Conducting this experiment has been a very valuable experience, providing interesting conclusions as to how people may collaborate through virtual environments. It has also provided us with interesting insights in terms of how to conduct such an experiment – insights which will be incorporated into the follow-up experiment to be conducted in 2009!

The researchers: Frans Feldberg, Alexander Schouten & Bart van den Hooff,
VU University Amsterdam,
Faculty of Economics and Business Administration,
Section Knowledge, Information & Networks

I actually question whether increasing your visibility, within the firewall, is something many people strive for. More inside visibility certainly increases the amount of questions you receive (thus more e-mail, more distractions), while outside visibility as an expert may be more interesting.

Obviously, it is motivating to contribute something if you know that their actually is an audience for your contribution. Hoewever, I notice that some of the contributions I make (like sharing a relevant link in delicious), I also do for selfish reasons: I need to be able to find that link again in the future and by sharing and tagging it, I benefit as well.

Anyway, I am curious about your personal experiences: why do you contribute to social software that runs behind the firewall?

The test is currently only available in Dutch and can be downloaded here.

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!

Projective is a department of Rabobank Netherlands. Its 80 employees are professional project managers responsible for complex projects within the Rabobank organization. For the duration of their projects they are stationed elsewhere, for example at the Utrecht or Eindhoven headquarters, at affiliate organizations, or at local banks throughout The Netherlands. As such, they form a group of nomadic workers that is scattered throughout the organization and the country. As a consequence, and due to the constant influx and outflux of employees, Projective is facing the challenge of how to effectively organize knowledge sharing within the department. In this pilot case, we quickly discovered that social connectedness is a key prerequisite for informal knowledge sharing.

Purpose

• Help Rabobank Projective to improve knowledge sharing between its employees.
• Investigate instruments and conditions that will stimulate Projective employees to share knowledge with their colleagues.
• Use a living lab approach to (1) generate and validate a set of instruments and (2) create active involvement of Projective employees

Key lessons learned

• Individual freedom and autonomy in new ways of working come at a price: colleagues can become alienated (socially disconnected) all to easily.
• Lack of social connectedness can be a powerful factor limiting knowledge sharing between colleagues.
• To improve social connectedness between colleagues a coherent approach is needed in the mental world, physical world, and virtual world.
• Measures in the mental world stimulate; measures in the physical and virtual worlds facilitate.

Improving social connectedness

The model of the “three worlds” can be used to come up with a set of coherent and mutually strengthening measures that improve social connectedness and knowledge sharing.

• Create the motivation and culture for mutual contact (mental world). Define common ambitions that unite employees. Stimulate informal contacts; consider them a valuable investment. Explicitly allow time for informal meetings during working hours.
• Use your office space to facilitate mutual contact (physical world). Create a home base where colleagues can be sure to ‘bump into’ one another. Make your home base a place where employees like to be, with good coffee and a pleasant atmosphere.
• Make colleagues curious about one another (virtual world). Help employees to create and maintain a personal home page (MySite) with photo, interests, working experience, and contact details. Create a team website (OurSite) with department news, facebook, expertise finder, and proper access to frequently used information.

Virtual instruments to facilitate social connectedness

In a workshop with several Projective volunteers, a range of virtual instruments and social media was presented and discussed to assess their potential to facilitate social connectedness and knowledge sharing.

Instruments were then evaluated by letting the volunteers individually assign 10 bonus points and 10 penalty points among the presented instruments. Bonus points represent perceived benefits, whereas penalty points represent perceived costs such as required time & effort.

MySites (personal homepages on Sharepoint) and OurSite (department website) were evaluated best. Learning points from the discussion were (1) the individual perspective (‘what’s in it for me’) cannot be ignored, (2) employees focus on the efficiency of an instrument (‘it shouldn’t cost extra time’); and (3) conservative instruments are favored over untraditional ones because the latter have not yet clearly demonstrated their value.

Next steps

A small team of early adopters will soon start experimenting with social media to gain practical experience and to share lessons learned in moderated sessions. Their experiences will then be translated to the department: what are the drawbacks and benefits, what is the business case. More on this soon.

Future Workspaces organizes, together with IBM, a workshop on Enterprise Social Software. The workshop will be held on Wednesday September 17, from 9:30 to 12:30 hours at IBM The Netherlands, Amsterdam. The workshop is not an introduction into blogs, wikis, social bookmarking and social networking: instead it is aimed at sharing knowledge and experiences with the introduction and usage of such social tools within enterprises. A large part of the workshop will be devoted to sharing experiences and learning from each other. We hope you can join and share your insights and experiences.

Please visit the workshop wiki at http://workspace.telin.nl for the full programme, the list of participants and a list of topics the participants would like to discuss.