• 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!

Periodiek organiseert het NAF (Nederlands Architectuur Forum) vanuit de werkgroepen special interest sessies over specifieke thema’s, de Naf insights, in samenwerking met Automatisering Gids en Informatie. Eén van deze sessies is getiteld: Web 2.0 in de Enterprise
Enkele sprekers op het event: 

• Jeffrey Walker, President en CEO Atlassian
• Robert Slagter, Novay
• Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur, co-founder Fleck & initiator The Next Web Conference
• Steven Webster, Director Adobe Systems Incorporated

Reboot, the yearly unconference on innovation, new technologies, creativity and visions will be held again on June 25-26 2009, in Copenhagen, Denmark. More information will become available on: http://www.reboot.dk/

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.

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

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?

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!