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!