Team Blog

During their design case project, four User System Interaction students from Eindhoven University of Technology (Sophia Atzeni, Annemiek van Drunen, Aljosja Jacobs, and Dirk Verhagen) have designed a brainstorming application for our multi-touch wall made by SOCO Amsterdam. Below they briefly describe their project and the results.

“On assignment for Future Workspaces we have looked into how to improve collaborative moments for knowledge workers using multi-touch technology. One of the most promising collaborative activities that could be improved was brainstorming. An interactive system already offers many advantages, and especially during the idea clustering phase the advantages of multi-touch can be leveraged. We have developed such a brainstorming application in collaboration with knowledge workers and validated the concept using focus groups.

With our application we try to bring a good deal more fun to the brainstorming process by providing brainstorm participants with interactive games. These games bring participants to the multi touch wall, and also release some of the tensions associated with selecting ‘winning’ ideas. Next to that, we also made large improvements on the clustering process. We feel it is important to be able to freely try different clusterings, and be able to play around during this phase. Using intuitive gestures, and using a ’bubble’ metaphor, brainstorm participants are able to create, move, remove, resize, rearrange, undo and relate clusters and ideas. During the entire brainstorm we support structuring the discussion with a ‘compare idea’ tool so participants can backtrack decisions and their rationale.

Are you curious to see how this all works together to support an entire brainstorming session, from creation of ideas to the selection of them? Then please, check out our movie prototype below. We welcome any comments you might have.”

Zoals aangekondigd in een eerdere blogpost hebben we dit jaar een korte reeks experimenten met sociale media uitgevoerd bij de afdeling Projective van Rabobank  Nederland. Het doel van de experimenten was om te leren in hoeverre sociale media een bijdrage kunnen leveren aan verbondenheid en kennisdelen in een afdeling van verspreid werkende project management professionals. De sociale media die voor dit doel zijn geselecteerd en gebruikt zijn Twitter, Sharepoint discussiefora, en een Buddyspotter variant (Hi WaarZitWie).

Onderstaande presentatie vat de aanleiding, uitvoering, en geleerde lessen van de experimenten samen. Enkele interessante uitkomsten zijn:

• sociale media versterken de informele kant van een organisatie;
• sociale media faciliteren het leggen van contact en het elkaar weten te vinden (oftewel het versterken en verrijken van je netwerk);
• sociale media versnellen het op zoek gaan naar informatie ten opzichte van het omslachtige via-via doorverwezen worden naar anderen.

Twitter en discussiefora blijken complementaire meerwaarde te bieden voor kennisdelen. Twitter is georiënteerd  op personen; het faciliteert daardoor het leggen van contact en het versterkt de onderlinge verbondenheid. Discussiefora zijn daarentegen georiënteerd  op onderwerpen, ze faciliteren het elkaar informeren en het terugvinden van informatie over een specifiek onderwerp. Een hechte en gebruiksvriendelijke integratie van Twitter en discussiefora, zoals deze bijvoorbeeld in Yammer te vinden is, lijkt daarom voor het bevorderen van verbondenheid en kennisdelen een zeer geschikte optie.

At the Dutch National Architecture congress (LAC2009) we have given a talk on the organizational and architectural aspects of introducing Web2.0 tools. One of the main issues we discussed was how to support your employees to make responsible use of social media and how to deal with negative responses, complaints or online discussions about your brand that are getting out of hand. One of the interesting approaches companies such as ING and UPC are experimenting with is a webcare team.

A webcare team monitors online conversations on Twitter, blogs and other social media and has a strategy on how to deal with various types of negative responses via social media. When necesary, they can join the conversation, offer support, provide facts or anything else to steer things in the right direction. But it is not just about customer care, the webcare team can also do PR (discovering and preventing issues) and marketing (educating customers or providing feedback to product development).

Why do companies actually care about what is being said in social media? More and more companies realize that, in line with the Cluetrain Manifesto, “markets are conversations”: customers trust opinions of friends a lot more than they trust company websites, and they use information about products and services found on social media to make informed choices.

Who should be in your webcare team?
From the type of work a webcare team has to do, it should be clear that this is not a job for the IT department. Instead, people from marketing and corporate communication should be involved, and maybe even experts on your products and services. Pick your team from people who understand the norms of social media and are able to respond from a personal perspective. As such, your manager PR and corporate communication is probably not a good candidate for the job.

The tools of the trade
Webcare teams get more and more tools to discover what is currently being said about their brand, products and services. Important tools of the trade are Google Alerts, Twitter search, Technorati and Google blog search. These tools are all aimed at discovering relevant online conversations, without having to spend the whole day looking.

What is a smart social media strategy?
Unfortunately, there is no universal recipe for a smart social media strategy yet. Nevertheless, an important starting point is to accept each opinion as such, and not call opinions into question. As with any employee that takes part in an online conversation, the norm is to identify yourself as an employee of the company and behave accordingly. Also it seems important not to be drawn into online discussions: seek direct communication with the person behind the complaint. For more inspiration on social media strategies, I suggest you take a look at the IBM Social Computing guidelines.

I would like to hear your experiences with webcare teams!

The slides of our talk (in Dutch) are available via slideshare:

The bias storm is a method we apply at the start of collaboration, when the people who have to collaborate come from different backgrounds, cultures or organizations. The method aims to get prejudices they might have about the other in the open. Talking about these prejudices helps to understand the other and clears the road for fruitful future collaboration.

How it works
This method should be used during the initial session of people who have to collaborate. Immediately after the initial round of who is who and why are we here together today, form pairs of people from different backgrounds, cultures, organizations or whatever barrier you wish to level. Ask these pairs to write down on sticky notes what prejudices their colleagues might have against people from the other “side”. It is important not to ask what prejudices they have; as that might result in only the politically correct responses. While they are writing these down, walk around and stimulate them with questions such as: “What did your colleages say when they heard you had this session?”.

After a few minutes, when you notice that “the popcorn stops popping” ask the people from one “side” to read out what they have written down. Write key terms on a big piece of paper. Try to defer any defence (“I would like to react on that…”, “Let me put that straight…”) to the next phase. Then ask the people from the other side to read out what they have written down and collect their key terms on a different piece of paper. Then start the next phase by just asking “Who would like to react?”

Our experience is that this method is a powerful starter for cross-organizational collaboration projects.

(c) photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/agharti

Since one of our customers would like to experiment with close collaboration across organizational boundaries (discussing information), I am currently comparing a series of tools. The table below represents my findings from testing the different alternatives. The information in the row “User friendliness” is subjective: it indicates how easy I could find my way around the tool. If you see information in the table that you consider to be not correct, please let me know or post a comment. (more…)

Within Future Workspaces, Jennifer Curtis conducted a study of mobile workers in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a Professional Doctorate in Engineering in the area of User-System Interaction from Eindhoven University of Technology. Her findings are summarized in this post. The complete project report can be found here, and corresponding presentation here.

The two main goals of Jennifer’s project were to: (1) Identify the consequences and challenges of mobile work – particularly with respect one’s ability to stay up-to-date (i.e., in sync) and connected (i.e., in touch) with his or her distant colleagues; and, (2) come up with potential design solutions to address these challenges.

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In a previous post about the Future Workspaces Concept Game we have described how individials can be inspired by the concepts in the game and how it can help them think about how they want to live and work in the future.

When the Concept Game is played by more people in an organization, it can help that organization determine what aspects of future ways of working are important for the people in that organization. The Concept Game can be played in a workshop of 8 to 10 people. In the workshop, people first select their own favourite and not favourite concepts. Secondly, the choices are explained and discussed by the group. Finally, a coherent view is created on what issues and opportunities of future ways of working are most important for the organization. You can download a flyer about the Future Workspaces Concept Game Workshop here.

Steven Haveman, Industrial Design Student at the University of Twente completed his master’s graduation assignment within FWS on a study towards new ways of working for system architects. This post is a roundup of the results obtained in this research project. It shows the general findings and the findings regarding the concepts that were developed.

Steven’s research project has been a study towards new ways of working for system architects. System architects are responsible for the architecture of complex systems, like printers, MRI-scanners or radar systems. A series of interviews has been conducted with system architects at Océ, Philips and Thales to discuss concepts and obtain insights. This resulted in Project Buzz Tracker, a tool that couples activity information to project and workflow planning. Persons frequently give an update on their actions, thus showing the Buzz in a project. By observing this overview, the system architect can see concentrations or a lack of Buzz. These can be indications of problematic issues. Project Buzz Tracker will further strengthen team cohesion, especially if distant workers are involved.
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Based on our experiences with doing workshops to discuss the social media landscape and facilitating experiments to gain hands-on experience with these tools inside organizations, we are now developing three concrete FWS products around social media:
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We are proud to present the Future Workspaces booklet series!

The booklets illustrate insights, best practices, and lessons learned during two years of research, concept development, case studies, and special interest sessions with experts and industry. We plan to regularly update the series with new booklets.

Currently, the series contains the following four titles:

• Connecting professionals: How to stimulate corporate conversations through social media by Robert Slagter
• Lab: New tools for new ways of working by Geke Ludden
• Generations@work: Embracing young talent by Ellen Szwajcer
• Four challenges for knowledge workers: Effects of working anytime, anywhere by Ruud Janssen

We hope you like the booklets and we welcome any feedback.