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.

• 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 usage13 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.

The group members created Twitter accounts, invited each other as contacts and started using the tool without any prior training. After one month of experimenting with the tool we held an evaluation workshop with them.

Questionnaire

The workshop started with a brief questionnaire to assess the ease of use, costs and benefits of Twitter. The outcome indicated that the tool was actively used during the test period and they perceived the tool easy to use. Although Twitter rated poorly as a tool for traditional knowledge management (finding experts and finding information on a specific topic), it rated moderately well as a tool for informal knowledge sharing and getting to know each other.

Sharing experiences

As a next step, we asked the group to share experiences: what worked well, what not, how did Twitter fit their working practices. A summary of their statements:

• “Easy to use”
• “Quick way to contact your colleagues”
• “Nice to read”
• “The more busy, the less Twitter”
• “Got to know my colleagues better”
• “Does not provide insight in what my colleagues are good at”
• “All contributions are in a timeline, it does not provide an overview”
• “Cannot find anything back”
• “Sometimes forgot to use it for days”
• “Mood sometimes too jolly”
• “Questions regarding work often too long for a Tweet”
• “Sometimes not enough activity”

Conclusions

Twitter is a tool that is easy to use and fun as well. There is moderate perceived value for sharing knowledge withing the department. Since it is not easy to have an overview of who is writing on what topics, the tool is not suitable to find experts within a group or finding specific information (the aims of traditional knowledge management). However, the tool did help the group to get to know each other, thereby stimulating informal knowledge sharing. Since the tool was not embedded in their daily working practices, contributions were irregular over time and usually of an informal nature. Contributions resulted in a follow-up not so much online, but rather face-to-face at the office. The perceived risk of using Twitter in a business environment is that it either leads to no contributions or to so many contributions that one loses track.

As Nathan argues, successful Enterprise 2.0 style collaboration requires both technical and cultural maturity. Also from my own experiences, I know that cultural maturity is usually the biggest hurdle: it takes bravery and trust to take a discussion to a shared space or even to an open space.

Therefore, we also perform personality tests during our pilots in Future Workspaces. We are testing a hypothesis that personality is an important factor that determines what workspace fits a person. (According to our hypotheses, other main factors are a person’s activities and personal working style.)

This would mean that for some people blogging or contributing to a wiki is a more natural way of working then for other people. However, even if personality is an important factor, this does not mean that you are “stuck” in a specific state, determined by your personality. I believe that in a culture of mutual trust and with appropriate support (starting small, sharing good practices, showing success stories, talking about things that are scary), people can learn to share more (intermediate) thoughts in an open space.

To lower the threshold for sharing in a shared space or in an open space, I combine two main approaches:

1. Help them find opportunities to embed this sharing as part of normal work processes: if they are used to creating a document with intermediate findings while searching for information on topic Y, why not put that information in a wiki page? Moreover, this may speed up the search process, as others may contribute as well.
2. Explain that sharing thoughts in a blog or in a wiki is not about sharing final results, it is about contributing to an ongoing conversation. That is one of the main reasons why I do not like to compare an Intranet wiki with Wikipedia, as it sets completely wrong standards for contributions.

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?

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.