• Startmeting. Elke Future Workspaces klantcase begint met een startmeting. Het doel van deze meting is om een ijkpunt vast te stellen: hoe gaan de individuen in het team om met informatie (welke strategieën hanteren ze) en hoe gaan ze om met kennis delen. Verder stelt deze startmeting vast welke typen kenniswerk de teamleden doen en worden persoonlijkheidskenmerken gemeten. Dit laatste is bijvoorbeeld relevant om uitspraken te kunnen doen over de effectiviteit van verschillende strategieën en technologieën voor verschillende typen mensen. Bij wie is de kans groot dat een wiki of een blog aanslaat?
• Interviews. Aan het begin van de Unplugged klantcase zijn een reeks interviews uitgevoerd met de leden van het Unplugged team. Het doel hierbij was om een beeld te krijgen van de situatie waarin het team zich bevindt, waar quick wins te bereiken zijn en om belangrijke randvoorwaarden voor de interventies boven water te krijgen.
• Cultural probe. Dit middel heeft als doel om input te verzamelen vanuit het Unplugged team over wat zij op dit moment al echt Unplugged vinden aan hun manier van werken en waar dat nog te wensen overlaat. Bij de cultural probe is een tiental Unplugged medewerkers gevraagd om gedurende een aantal weken foto’s te maken van situaties waarbij ze het gevoel hadden echt Unplugged bezig te zijn, maar ook van situaties die niet bij de Unplugged filosofie passen. Door hiermee bezig te zijn en de resultaten met elkaar te bespreken, begint feitelijk al een interventie.
• Workshops. We hebben een workshop georganiseerd om de Unplugged leden de resultaten van de cultural probe te laten bespreken en een workshop rond Unplugged samenwerken. Deze workshop diende om ervaringen, tips en trucs rond nieuwe manieren en tools voor samenwerken binnen het team te delen.
• Inspiratie bieden. Om de Unplugged leden zelf en bezoekers van de Beneluxstaete inspiratie te bieden over de mogelijkheden van innovatieve (virtuele) hulpmiddelen hebben we twee richtingen gevolgd: 1) informeren van de Unplugged leden via e-mail en presentaties, en 2) door concrete prototypes te laten zien op de Werkplaats – de plek waar bezoekers (van binnen en buiten de Rabobank) een kijkje kunnen nemen in de toekomst van Rabo Unplugged.

The physical version of the Concept Game can be played individually or in a workshop. It is also possible to play the Concept Game online.

Click here to start playing the Concept Game online. You will be asked to select your favourite and least favourite concept ideas. Please also tell us why you have selected these concepts and submit your choices. It will help us to focus our future plans and concept development.

The online version of the Concept Game was developed by Steven Haveman.

» Start the Concept Game

From there, I recorded how many people approached the touch screens and how many people actually touched them. When I noticed that they were about to leave again, I approached the people and did a brief interview to find out how they used the application and how they felt about it. I also interviewed a few people who entered the room, looked at the touch screens, but did not touch them.

Some of the initial findings:

• About 40% of the passers-by actually touched the screen of Buzzcuit.
  Many of the people who did not touch the Buzzcuit screen were not aware this was a touch screen.
• The fact that Buzzcuit is visible from the hallway resulted in extra “traffic” to the room.
• The option to send yourself mail from Buzzcuit needs some rework – people did not understand how the mail interface worked or expected to be able to send a personalized message.
• The pawns we used as part of the interaction with the MS Surface table attract attention of passers-by.
• The MS Surface applications “compete” with a series of non-functioning applications that some of the visitors already know. The fact that new applications are available needs to be advertised.
• People are inspired by the Combine & Create application as it is one of the first examples of applications that target knowledge workers.

More to come in a few weeks – after a bit more evaluating.

Some characteristics of the expertise group

• 14 researchers with a shared interest in how ICT affects work, life, and society;
• they are working in the same research institute, but located over various parts of the building;
• they frequently work elsewhere, for instance during client visits, workshops, conferences;
• they are all working on several different projects at a time;
• they are well acquainted with one another, though not co-working on a daily basis;
• they share a feeling that cohesion and knowledge sharing in the group could be improved. 

Twitter usage

13 People in the group used Twitter during the experiment, of which 5 were already using it. Usage statistics (averaged over all participants, those new to Twitter, and those experienced with Twitter) are shown in the table below. The table clearly shows that the new Twitter users twittered less and were following far fewer people outside the group than the experienced Twitter users. During the experiment, 2 new Twitter users gave up on Twitter.

Twitter evaluation

From the people who used Twitter, 11 completed the Twitter evaluation form. The form contained 10 statements, to be answered on a 5-point Likert scale (from -2 to 2 for “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”). The spider graph below shows the results.

The graph shows that, overall, Twitter is evaluated quite positively. Twitter scores extremely high on the aspect of getting to know your colleagues more personally. Furthermore, Twitter scores very high on ease of use, and the benefits for work clearly seem to outweigh the costs of using it. However, Twitter scores poorly on the aspects of finding information on a certain topic or finding an expert on a certain topic.

Twitter experiences

An individual brainstorm (reflecting on personal experiences with Twitter, and writing these down on post-its) was followed by a group discussion on four themes. 10 People participated in this brainstorm and discussion. Highlights are presented below.

Likes & Dislikes

Likes:

• It’s nice to “follow” your colleagues: what have they been doing, what are they up to.
• You don’t necessarily have to react to what others are twittering.
• Twitter can be used like an RSS feed to follow developments on a topic or the lives of celebrities.
• Twitter is easy to install and use, and it easily integrates into tools like Facebook and Blogger.

Dislikes:

• Requests from unknown people who want to follow you; how did these people find me?
• No option to tweet to different groups, for instance, just to colleagues or to friends.
• It’s difficult to find a good balance of how many followers/following (Quitter!!!).
• Some people twitter too much, they “bury” the tweets of others.
• The “avalanche” of unread tweets if you didn’t log into Twitter for a while.
• For “quality” information you should turn to weblogs, not to Twitter.

Staying in sync & Staying in touch

Staying in sync:

• You can get a better feeling about what’s going on in some projects.
• Twitter can be used to get up to date on general news in your field.
• It helped to stay in sync and in touch when colleagues were out of office.
• Twitter doesn’t help you to stay in sync if you don’t have the time to check it frequently.
• The mobile client does not support URLs, so tweets using URLs are difficult to interpret.

Staying in touch:

• It provides a sense of being in touch, albeit fragmented (not always, and without an overview).
• It’s difficult to get into an ongoing conversation.
• It works really well to stay in touch with people who are far away.
• It lowers the threshold to stay in touch with people as it is less intrusive than IM, email, phone.
• Being aware of relatively small details (what are people doing, and where they are) gives a good sense of being in touch.

Success stories & Disappointments

Success stories:

• I didn’t realize how much I would appreciate to stay in touch with my colleagues.
• Quickly got several responses on a request for input, ideas, or a translation.

Disappointments:

• Being too busy to use Twitter, a nagging feeling “I should have twittered more”.
• Time zone differences; too many tweets the next morning.
• The Twitter site experienced some problems and some of my tweets went missing.
• The Twitter client crashed and needed to be reinstalled.

Usability & “Other”

Usability:

• Some functionality is hidden or simply unknown, for instance the use of “#”.
• Difficult to compare the lists of “followers” and “following”.
• There are too many Twitter clients (PC and mobile) which is confusing.
• Mobile clients to not offer the support that is actually needed (e.g., overview of new tweets, being able to follow links).

“Other”:

• Reciprocity is a problem; some replies seem to be missing.
• Still able to use it even though I don’t have much time.
• Still don’t have the feeling that it integrated well into my work.

Conclusion

It is clear that Twitter is a useful tool for maintaining a sense of being “in touch” with your colleagues, especially when they are often out of office or when you otherwise don’t see them often. A lack of time to frequently use Twitter is the main obstacle for staying “in touch”. But ease of use and the general opinion that it is fun to use, alleviate this and keep people motivated to use it.

Although Twitter allows one to send a request to followers, or to exchange information by sharing interesting URLs, for the people in this group it did not (yet) provide clear benefits with regard to more traditional aspects of knowledge sharing, like finding information on a topic or finding an expert on a topic.

Probably the best indicator for the success of this experiment is that, at the end of the evaluation workshop, all people who were still using Twitter indicated that they would continue to use the tool.

Alike the Projective case we organized a ‘marketplace’, covering the walls of the meeting room with posters containing screenshots and descriptions (what is it? what can you do with it? what are benefits and drawbacks?) of various social media. It was fun to do this, especially since some colleagues had strong opinions in favour or against certain social media - lively discussions just had to follow. Surprisingly, it took a workshop like this for some colleagues to realize that they were already using the same social medium!

The second aim of the workshop was to initiate a series of trials, each trial centered around one social medium and lasting for period of two months. We therefore asked our group members to cast their votes: five bonus points to be freely assigned to those social media that they liked, thought to be beneficial, were curious about, etc.; and five penalty points to be assigned to those social media that they disliked, felt uncomfortable about, couldn’t see the use of, etc. During a brief coffee break we then summarized the results.

Much of the discussion that followed after the coffee break focused our first trial: should it be Twitter or Yammer? Proponents of Yammer argued that it has useful functionality that makes it very well suited as a platform to exchange knowledge and to find experts. Proponents of Twitter (four colleagues were already using it actively)  argued that Yammer enforces an arbitrary division between one’s professional network inside and outside the organization, practically forcing one to use Twitter and Yammer side by side.

For this reason the choice was made to start the first trial with Twitter. Over the next two months we and our expertise group colleagues will use the tool, regularly evaluating its impact on knowledge sharing. We will conclude the two month trial period with a workshop where we will also pick a tool for the next two-month trial. By that time, expect on update on this post.

A Living Lab experiment typically consists of 5 steps, as illustrated in the figure above:

1. We typically work demand-driven: a team or a team leader has signalled a need. As a first step, we perform our own observations and analysis of the current working practices of the team. This is done via interviews, working at the customer site and joining customer meetings. As a result, we gain insight in the real issues (which are sometimes different from the initialy indicated bottlenecks), we discover possibilities for improvement and understand the playing field for our interventions.
2. We continue by planning the intervention. Based on our observations and analysis we derive what (technology) intervention may be beneficial and a strategy for executing that intervention. Given that we use short cycles to experiment, we typically use a small group of team members to perform the experiment with. As part of this phase, we also identify candidates for the experiment.
3. We execute the intervention. Typically this means that we let a small group of team members work with an innovative technology as part of their normal work. For instance, in a process where they would normally create a document for themselves to gather information on a topic, we would set up a wiki where they would have to gather the information instead.
4. We collect and share experiences and good practice. We interview and observe team members to gather their experiences and good practices. Additionally, we organise a workshop with the team members involved in the experiment to share experiences and good practices. Typically, we also make sure the team members have some channel (forum, blog, wiki page) during the experiment where they can exchange tips and communicate with us for help.
5. We evaluate the intervention: What are the (perceived) benefits? What are the (perceived) costs (e.g., extra work people have to do)? How much was the technology used? For what purposes what it used? Does it fit their working practices? Does it fit their organizational culture? Based on the evaluation we advise the team about next steps.

In Future Workspaces, we use very short cycles of experimenting. Although we do extensive interviews and observations beforehand at the customer site, an actual cycle of an experiment takes 4 to 6 weeks. This requires serious commitment from the team, not just as passive test subjects, but as active participants in the experiment. Also, it means we have to be frequently at the customer site.