Managing social software applications in the corporate and public sector environments

Maritime Information Management Day_2009

Louise F. SpiteriSchool of Information Management

[email protected]

Managing social software applications in the corporate and public sector

environments

Maritime Information Management Day_2009

Definition of social software

CMS Watch (cmswatch.com) defines social software as: “Tools for collaboration and networking within and beyond the

enterprise.”

Social software supports collaboration, knowledge creation, sharing and publication, identifying experts and getting access to expert opinions worldwide. It leaves the control of knowledge with the individuals owning it.

Maritime Information Management Day_2009

The push for social software

Today, employees looking for greater flexibility as well as support for more ad-hoc processes are frequently using a more bottom-up approach to electronic collaboration, in some cases circumventing official information systems, using freely-available tools on the public Web.

Exposure to technology and tools such as Facebook, iTunes, YouTube, and Wikipedia, is raising the bar on use expectations concerning interfaces, collaboration and content access, not only on the Web, but on the intranet as well.

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Comparison of software

Traditional

Start point: ProjectStructure before useTop downKnowledge belongs to expertsCentral controlFormalRigidSlowExpensive

Social

Start point: UsersStructure emerges with useBottom upEveryone is knowledgeableUser controlInformal & easy to useFlexibleQuickFree or inexpensive

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Importance of Enterprise 2.0 technologies

A 2008 survey of over 400 business conducted by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) found that:

44% of respondents said that Enterprise 2.0 technologies are “imperative” or of “significant importance” for their organization.

27% of respondents said that technologies such as RSS, blogs, and wikis have an impact on business goals and success.

74% of the respondents, however, claim to have only a vague familiarity with the technologies.

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Key areas of social software

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Examples of social software vendors

Social software suites• Drupal • Awareness Networks• Connectbeam • Jive Software• Traction Software Wiki software• Atlassian• Mediawiki• Socialtext

Blog software• SixApart• Automatic• Google Blogger Public networks• LinkedIn• Facebook• XING

http://www.cmswatch.com/social/vendors/

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Wikis

Wikis are primarily used for collaborative work on documents and can be used for many different applications. Since the wikis are so easy to use by people of all levels of technical expertise, the uses are only limited by the end user’s imagination. Examples of Wiki applications include:

Cooperative authoring environmentRapid production of Web pages for subsequent publishingNewslettersCommittee minutesTechnical documentation

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Potential drawbacks of Wikis

The major concern in the use of wikis is the validity of the information that the various authors have added.

In the case of Wikipedia, if someone adds inaccurate information others will correct the information.

In the enterprise, it is expected that the same thing will happen. Most articles will be the best the end user can contribute, because they would not want to ruin their reputation among colleagues and peers.

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Blogs

Enterprises can use blogs to create powerful knowledge bases of company information and employee sharing and continual learning.

Companies can use blogs to communicate with employees and customers.

Leaders can use their blogs to update employees.

Blogs can be used to replace email and can also provide an archive of all communications.

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Potential drawbacks of Blogs

Blog risks include:Copyright infringementInvasion of privacyDefamation, sexual harassment and other legal claims;Trade secret theft, financial disclosures, and other security breaches; Productivity drainsMismanagement of electronic business records

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Social tagging applications

Tagging has acquired popularity as a flexible approach to classifying information. Tagging allows individuals to use their own terms to describe a resource, without the need to select terms from a taxonomy.

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Enterprise social bookmarking: Considerations

Corporate firewalls may prevent access to public bookmarking resources to anyone outside the organization.

Public sharing of bookmarks to intranet resources may be of concern as proprietary information could be leaked.

The success of internet-based social bookmarking , however, suggests that enterprises or organizations would benefit from a social bookmarking system. IBM, for example, has created its own internal bookmarking system called Dogear.

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Enterprise social tagging applications

Social bookmarking can assist your enterprise by:Providing research analysts with a place to share research findings

Helping to form and support social networks around interest areas

Enhancing the value of other information retrieval and aggregation capabilities on your intranet

By using the emergent folksonomy to augment your corporate subject taxonomy strategy

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Enterprise social tagging applications

The same tagging mechanism that is used in social bookmarking sites could be modified for bookmarking people in an enterprise:

Tagging may be an effective way to organize contacts

Social tags may inform others about someone’s interests, skills, and expertise

People-tagging benefits from properties unique to the enterprise, including a pre-populated directory.

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Enterprise social networking

An example of an enterprise social networking applications is Beehive, developed for IBM employees to help connect with co-workers (used by 40,000 employees).

The intent of Beehive is to provide a Facebook-like environment, geared more toward professional interaction, although personal interaction is also a legitimate part of the experience.

Users can develop their profiles and post information, including a "Hive Five" listing that describes the areas about which they are passionate.

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Potential drawbacks of enterprise bookmarking

Polysemy: The tag port could refer to a sweet fortified wine, a porthole, a place for loading and unloading ships, the left-hand side of a ship or aircraft, or a channel endpoint in a communications system.

Idiosyncrasies: Some tags may have little meaning to anyone but their creator, e.g., Neat_stuff; criggo

Variant spellings: humor, humour

Collapsing or awkward compound terms: e.g. starwars, star_wars

Singular and plural variants: comic, comics

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RSS feeds

With the creation of wikis, blogs, and enterprise bookmarking, and tagging, new information is generated all of the time. The user will find it hard to keep returning to all of the wikis, blogs, bookmarks, and new tags that have been created.

Enterprise RSS may help solve the overload on infrastructure such as email boxes and multiple user computers requesting feeds by including feeds in an enterprise RSS product. The feeds are read by an RSS feed reader server and then delivered to the user in an enterprise, thus reducing network traffic.

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Information management concerns in an Enterprise 2.0 environment

Protecting the security, accuracy, and integrity of the information.

Managing the creation, collection, storage, and dissemination of vast amounts of unstructured and constantly changing information.

Controlling access to particular levels and types of information.

Assessing the legal implication of vast amounts of information in scattered systems and databases.

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Information management policies

Before implementing any of the enterprise 2.0 applications, policies should be written and reviewed with all employees, whether the websites will be internal or external or both.

Copyright laws should be reviewed and a policy of no tolerance for copyright infringement should be in place.

Develop comprehensive policies that ensure that IM or Web 2.0 applications are managed consistently across the agency.

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Information management policies

Address the authorized use of technology and provide guidelines for the management of the records generated during the use of Blogs, Wikis, etc.

Explain clearly that users may have no expectation of privacy.

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Compliance

The Canadian General Standards Board’ s Electronic Records as Documentary Evidence (CAN/CGSB-72.34-2005) outlines the main requirements for ensuring that electronic records generated from electronic information systems are reliable, authentic and trustworthy.

CAN/CGSB-72.34-2005 is intended to assist both the public and private sectors in meeting one of the evidentiary requirements for acceptance of electronic records in legal proceedings.

Government of Canada. Canadian General Standards Board. (2006). CGSB releases new national standard on electronic records as documentary evidence. Retrieved June 15, 2009, from http://www.pwgsc.gc.ca/cgsb/info/news/calibre/011_001/article01-e.html