RSS
In the current economic state of the world it is not easy to get organizations to experiment with innovative tools to support knowledge work. Very rightfully, they may ask: “So, why are our current tools – e-mail and file sharing on a network drive – not good enough?”. The challenge lies in explaining how innovative technologies can make them work better, quicker, more efficient and with more fun. In a nice interview by Stowe Boyd with Jeff Walker and Jay Simons of Atlassian they talk about the State Of Enterprise 2.0. I especially like their conclusion that we should aim for small, kaizen-style improvements and learning from the community, and not try jumping into a mass transformation.
Posts Tagged ‘web2.0’
Lots of interesting upcoming events
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
The coming weeks our agenda is full of interesting events. I’m sharing my list, although I won’t be able to make it to all of them:
- June 17: The Professional Playground of the Future (our project day)
- June 22: Passion at work: blogging practices of knowledge workers (Lilia Efimova’s PhD defence)
- June 22-24: ICE conference with a workshop by Marcel Bijlsma
- June 24: Web2.0 in the Enterprise (NAF Insight congres with me speaking on stimulating cohesion with social media)
- June 25-26: Reboot (a yearly gathering of creative minds on digital change and culture). Sad to have to skip this one…
Am I missing something here? (Not that the list above is manageable…) Post a comment!
Evaluating Twitter in a distributed department
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009
In the Future Workspaces Projective case a group of volunteers is experimenting with social media. The objective of this experiment is to assess whether social media can support knowledge sharing and social cohesion within a dispersed department. (more…)
Decision Making in Virtual Worlds: An Experiment
Monday, February 2nd, 2009Last year, an experiment was conducted at the VU University to determine what the role of virtual worlds could be in geographically distributed decision making processes. Virtual worlds have been receiving a lot of media attention over the past year, and people in organizations increasingly have experience in various virtual environments. Still, we are in the dark about the potential value of these environments for organizations. Combined with the fact that people in organizations increasingly work geographically dispersed, and independent of time and location, this triggered us to consider the possibilities of virtual worlds as group decision support systems.Our aim was to study the contribution of virtual worlds to geographically dispersed team decision making in terms of both facilitating (and improving) the interaction between participants, and improving the quality of the decision being reached. Not that important now, but I think we could better frame this in terms of communication/interaction and information gathering/processing. Improving the decision being reached is an outcome, while facilitating interaction concerns the process (see presentation) In order to be able to do this, we compared decision making in virtual worlds (we used Second Life for our experiment) to decision making that was supported by a purely text-based chat functionality. This would enable us to determine the added value of the visualization that virtual worlds offer in terms of both interaction and decision making.
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
Enterprise Collaboration Maturity Model
Wednesday, December 24th, 2008Although the post is already a year old, I only encountered the Enterprise Collaboration Maturity Model by Nathan Wallace this week. It captures quite nicely the journey we often see happening. The model is based on the notion that knowledge work is either individual or group based, and it is always performed in an individual, shared or open environment. The Enterprise Collaboration Maturity Model depicts these work modes, and argues that there is a logical journey that people in an enterprises take to reach each stage.
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Visibility drives contribution, or does it?
Monday, December 15th, 2008
According to the position paper by Brzozowski and Yardi from the HP Social Computing Lab, visibility of the author is a key reason why people contribute content in corporate social software. I found this interesting, yet also surprising. My expectation is that people contribute mainly because they know that of one of their contacts (not just some random co-worker) needs the answer. (more…)