Steven’s research project has been a study towards new ways of working for system architects. System architects are responsible for the architecture of complex systems, like printers, MRI-scanners or radar systems. A series of interviews has been conducted with system architects at Océ, Philips and Thales to discuss concepts and obtain insights. This resulted in Project Buzz Tracker, a tool that couples activity information to project and workflow planning. Persons frequently give an update on their actions, thus showing the Buzz in a project. By observing this overview, the system architect can see concentrations or a lack of Buzz. These can be indications of problematic issues. Project Buzz Tracker will further strengthen team cohesion, especially if distant workers are involved.

General Findings
Using interviews, it has been found out that system architects do not have specific communication needs. The communication needs that they have are generally applicable. The system architects do have unique information management needs, because they are the only ones in a project specifically interested in architecting information.
System architects (at least the ones that were interviewed) highly value face-to-face communication. Currently, they succeed in having these face-to-face communications with for example co-workers and customers. Nevertheless, assuming that workers become more and more dispersed, system architects have to find new means of communication too. The tools proposed in this research can play an important role in this respect. By doing a literature study, several aspects of the communication process were identified that deserve special attention, considering the area of system architecting.
When developing future concepts it is better to develop them by satisfying needs than by solving problems. Problems often have a short term nature, whereas needs will still exist in the future. A broad spectrum of solutions was created. By providing solutions for all identified needs, a large and relevant subset of solutions has been created. By combining these solutions into concepts, it is ensured that the concepts are relevant and solve the right issues. The concepts that have been elaborated aim at providing overview in various large data spaces.

Project Buzz Tracker
Because of limited time, only one concept was worked out. This concept is called Project Buzz Tracker. It makes innovative use of the upcoming phenomenon of social media. Project Buzz Tracker provides a clear, graphical overview on which persons are working on what tasks, something that is relevant in architecting. It shows small status updates (buzz) that are mapped on a project planning. The planning can be zoomed, revealing more detailed tasks. It may be less useful in small, closely located, project teams, but extremely useful in dispersed project teams, as there is less sense of what is happening in the project within these teams. Several filters can be applied, to find information more easily.

As this tool has to be used by a complete project team to be useful, it has been described how personal objections against using the tool can be taken away, and which benefits the tool holds for stakeholders. It is clear that the strongest focus must lie on making the tool suitable and beneficial for the whole project team. It is suggested that coupling this tool to to do software is a strong choice in this perspective. Also, providing incentives by integrating Project Buzz Tracker with already used tools should be pursued (i.e. integrate with Outlook). Thus, in further elaborations of Project Buzz Tracker, there should be a focus on making the tool useful for the complete project team.
Second, it has been noticed during various presentations of Project Buzz Tracker that the benefits of this tool were not emphasized enough. People who were presented with the concept, liked it, but failed to see the advantages. For each stakeholder group, a SWOT analysis was made which presents the advantages of the tool more clearly.

If you would like more information, the whole research report can be found here or you can contact Geke Ludden (Geke.Ludden@novay.nl).

We tested this prototype at the future workspaces project day. The participants of this day reacted enthusiastically, which resulted in approximately 100 swipes of badges within the hour. We are going to explore this way of social interaction more and extend this concept. If you are interested please feel free to contact us.

The workshop consisted of two parts: one in which the group explored and experienced how an interactive tool at the coffee corner could help trigger conversations and one part where they discussed key elements to make breaks valuable knowledge sharing moments, assisted by a visual thinker. For the experience part we used the prototype of Buzzcuit, pre-loaded with profiles of some of the workshop participants.

Some of the outcomes of the discussions that triggered me:

• Make sure you have breaks in pure virtual meetings (phone conferences, meetings in a virtual world) as well – and facilitate the chitchat that in non-virtual meetings proves to be so important for trust building.
• When using an interactive screen with profiles of people, target the information to the people around the screen (e.g., based on Bluetooth or RFID). That also allows for matchmaking.
• When talking about the office as a meeting space, the term “break” may be misleading. Talking to people, insiode and outside your team, is an important part of being a knowledge worker.
• Management should lead by example and take time to talk to people outside their usial circles.
• And although it is sometimes difficult to fit breaks in, realize that in the 21st century breaks is where an important part of the work is done. Break = work!

Dennis from Jam visualized outcomes of the discussion. More of the results (also from the other workshops) can be found here.

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