Collab-Or-Ate

Read here that Standard Chartered Bank is using Workbook, by the start-up WorkLight.

WorkBook: A Secure Corporate Overlay for Facebook

WorkBook allows employees to securely interact with their peers using the hugely-popular Facebook service. WorkBook combines all the capabilities of Facebook with all the controls of a corporate environment, including integration with existing enterprise security services and information sources. With WorkBook, employees can find and stay in touch with corporate colleagues, publish company-related news, create bookmarks to enterprise application data and securely share the bookmarks with authorized colleagues, update on status change and get general company news. Employees can freely use Facebook, with the WorkBook overlay, with no danger of information leaking outside the organization or access being granted to unauthorized personnel.

It is after 7pm on a Friday night, so I don’t have any comments to make at this time.

If you are working in the area of social networking within the workplace or organization, please submit a position paper to our CSCW 2008 workshop on Social Networking in Organizations! We expect it to be a great collection of people interested in this topic. Position papers are due Sept 26th and the workshop is Nov 19th in San Diego, CA. (We are excited to be part of a great line-up of workshops this year.)

Workshop on Social Networking in Organizations

Workshop Website: http://research.ihost.com/cscw08-socialnetworkinginorgs/

Overview:

Social networking websites, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, are heavily used by students to maintain friendships and by professionals to maintain contacts with others such as potential customers and recruits. Technologies such as email, IM, and weblogs were initially adopted by students and consumers for personal use and then moved into enterprises, having a significant impact on business environments. Social networking technologies seem to be following suit, perhaps more rapidly, but we are just beginning to explore how these applications are being used inside enterprises and large organizations. To what extent are they used to maintain or establish external ties to family, friends, and professional colleagues? To what extent are they being used to meet internal team or organizational goals? How are organizations responding?

This workshop will assemble 15-20 people with a research or applied industry interest in social networking in organizational or enterprise settings.

Those wishing to participate in the workshop should submit a 1 to 2 page extended abstract describing their research, experiences, or analyses of social networking software.

Important Dates:

Friday, September 26: position papers due
Friday, October 10: notification of acceptance
Sunday, November 9: workshop in San Diego, CA

Organizers:

Joan DiMicco, IBM Research
Werner Geyer, IBM Research
David Millen, IBM Research
Jonathan Grudin, Microsoft Research

Just randomly checked today and in less than 1 year Beehive has signed up more IBM users than Facebook, the largest social networking on the Internet! (39,300 vs. 39,236) We only have 64 more people, but I’m pretty confident we’ll keep the lead, given our adoption rate. (For some indication of adoption rates, in the last 2 hours, 30 people joined Beehive and 7 people joined Facebook’s IBM network.)

Have you heard of BizNik? It is YASNS, for business folks. Their homepage promotional banner declares that using their site you can “build relationships, promote your business and share your experience!” and these 3 basic actions resonate remarkable well with what we’re seeing on Beehive, inside of IBM.

We conducted a study of why people at IBM are using Beehive and our analysis reveals that workers differ from typical users of Internet social network sites, who have been shown to use SNSs primarily for keeping up with off-line friends (see boyd & Ellison, 2008). Within the walled garden of the enterprise, where there is a higher level of trust and an emphasis on work, IBM employees choose to reach out and meet new people rather than only connecting to those they know. They also share details of their life outside of work (”share your experience”) which has not been found with any frequency in other enterprise social software tools . And lastly, if motivated by career advancement goals or a desire to champion a project idea, they use the social network site strategically to connect (”build relationships”) and spread their message to a large audience (”promote your business”).

Luis Suarez, an IBM employee and one of our earliest and most enthusiastic Beehive users, has an article in the New York Times this week where he shares his amazing story: I freed myself from email’s grip. Luis has replaced his regular use of business email with phone calls, instant messaging, his wikis, his blog, and Beehive. There an interesting set of comments in response to his article on Lifehacker.

It is exciting that Luis sees our social network site Beehive as part of his set of critical business communication tools. Part of his reason for this is that Beehive is a public forum where he can answer things once, rather than many individual times.

My primary hypothesis as to why Luis and other employees are excited about checking their Beehive profile page and dread their email inboxes is that while the email inbox is one huge, enormous, always-growing to-do list, a social networking site is by definition social and there is a much lower level of obligation to reply or do anything in response to messages on the site. In many cases, there is no expectation to reply to that “friend request” or that friendly comment on your family photo. You are free to enjoy the environment and contribute content and comments when the mood strikes, and that is it. Who wouldn’t want to hang out there, as compared to within their piles of email?

If someone asks you something within Beehive that is 100% about work, it is similar to when a colleague asks you about the project while you are on your way to get coffee. You are available and willing to hear the question. You can defer the question or even ignore it, but in all likelihood your colleague is likely to get a response from you because you are in a context of being social, open and friendly.

So, can, should, or will social networking sites replace email? They can’t, shouldn’t, and won’t because they aren’t task-oriented inboxes. Employees crave an obligation-free communication environment, which is why they flock (buzz) to Beehive. And while they are there, sharing with each other, there many instances where the topics turn to business and real work gets done. But if social networking sites replace email, they wouldn’t be any fun any more!

The Associated Press wrote an article that talks about our social networking project Beehive: Next generation of business software could get more fun:

You can tell just from looking at the Beehive program under development at IBM Corp. that something is different. Beehive’s color scheme is bright yellow, not IBM’s standard blue. The cheerfulness reflects the fact that Beehive is meant to encourage far-flung co-workers to like each other more.

Beehive is an online portal for employees to describe their expertise, so valuable knowledge doesn’t get lost inside the bureaucracy. Those kinds of tools are common, but Beehive adds an unusual dose of Facebook or MySpace. The 27,000 IBMers using Beehive can post pictures, video and one-sentence updates about themselves. They can share lists of “things I can’t live without.”

Such personal touches often are missing when people work at a distance from one another, says Joan Morris DiMicco, an IBM researcher developing Beehive. Co-workers in different locales can’t wander into each other’s offices and see family pictures on the desk. They don’t shop at the same places or have children in the same schools.

These tidbits, DiMicco believes, help people understand each other better. And the usual communication tools like e-mail, instant messaging, phones and even videoconferencing do only so much to fill the gap.

The Associated Press: Next generation of business software could get more fun
USA Today: Virtual apps try to build camaraderie, productivity
CNN: ‘Virtual watercooler’ makes workplace more fun
Washington Post: Next generation of business software could get more fun
Red Orbit: Virtual Communities Boost Employee Productivity

A mention of Beehive on BusinessWeek’s Blogspotting: IBM’s del.icio.us: A big hit and also on the Intranet Blog: Could Facebook be a real intranet? IBM is onto something…

“The research goal of Beehive is to aid IBMers with various people-centric challenges within the workplace. We broadly categorize these challenges into “relationship building” and “people-sensemaking”.

Relationship-building challenges include, for example, new employees struggling with making connections that are important for their current project and professional growth, remote workers having difficulties with team building and staying in touch with their team members, or employees moving on to new assignments who are not easily able to stay touch with former colleges.

People-sensemaking includes, for example, the difficulties of discovering people with the right skills and common interests, or learning more about someone personally as well as professionally to facilitate making contact, or getting to know about ongoing projects and activities beyond your immediate team.”

Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal had an article about the challenges facing today’s information worker in terms of job satisfaction.

In the information age, so much is worked on in a day at the office but so little gets accomplished. In the past, one could see the fruits of his or her labor immediately: a chair made or a ball bearing produced. But it can be hard to find gratification from work that is largely invisible, or from delivering goods that are often metaphorical. You can’t even make a mark on a paper in increasingly paperless offices. It can be even harder trying to measure it all. (Satisfaction’s a tough job, WSJ, 2/19/08)

This article rings true for me. When work becomes exceptionally busy with meetings, powerpoints, decision-making, and travel, it feels like there isn’t anything to show for it at the end of it all. But back in the good old days (before the Internets?), after hard work there would be stuff built! and things made! To get some of that old fashioned satisfaction I’ve spent my past five weekends installing shelving around the house, in part because we need it, but mostly because I’m finding it so satisfying to set about a project that results in something tangible.

So what is an information worker to do? Could social networking tools come to the rescue?

Sounds like a stretch, but hear me out. I’ve been thinking lately about who uses social networking tools. What types of workers are most drawn to these tools? If it is the case that project managers, the prototypical information workers, use social networking tools more than engineers, the prototypical builder in a software company, then it may be because SN tools offer them something lacking in their existing day-to-day work.

What do social networking tools offer information workers?

• measurement! you can count your friends! you can count your connectedness! most importantly you can compare yourself to others and see how you stack up. If you can track it, it feels like you are accomplishing something.
• using the skills you have, you can build something. An information worker, who is skilled in communication but not programming, can build a digital representation (a profile) of him/herself quite easily using a social networking site. Engineers don’t need the technical infrastructure of a social networking site to build a webpage, but project managers do.
• connecting and maintaining social networks. This is the most obvious one. Social networking sites are designed for this purpose and I believe it suits information workers perfectly. Part of their job is to stay connected with “key stakeholders” and maintain these relationships. SN tools are the way to do this in the information age.

I’ve been working for a year now on Beehive, with Werner Geyer, Beth Brownholtz, and Casey Dugan. We can finally (officially) talk about it outside IBM, starting with Lotusphere, and there has been some buzz generated by that, in the press and the blogosphere:

In the press:
• eWeek: IBM`s Social Beehive and Discovery Search
• Business Week: Managing the Global Workforce (This is a more general article about IBM and mentions Beehive at the end as an example of how IBM is dealing with a globally distributed workforce.)
• CIO: IBM Shows Off Social Software for Business

And on the blogs:

• Judith Hurwitz’s Weblog: Is there a Link Between Social Computing and Business Networks?
• Collaborative Thinking: Lotusphere 2008: IBM Research - Glimpsing The Future
• Lotusphere 2008 - Day 2

While I was in Florida for the ACM Group conference, I visited Thomas Edison’s winter home and research laboratory in Fort Myers. Thomas Edison was good buddies with Henry Ford and the two of them, with their families, would spend their winters in Fort Myers, both enjoying the warm weather and working hard on their failed joint venture: cultivating a domestic source of rubber.

Edison was one dedicated inventor! Not only did he work every day of his long life, including while vacationing in Florida, but he also never slept more than two hours at a time, taking continuous cat naps throughout the day.

Edison’s career began with a number of great successes (e.g. the lighbulb :), which brought him fame and wealth, and this led to him forming a large R&D lab in Menlo Park, NJ. Later in his career, he had very few successes and a great number of expensive failures, such as trying to grow rubber domestically during WWII.

The tour I went on attributed some of his failures to his management style. When he began his career, he worked very closely with a small dedicated team, where each person was responsible for one part of the puzzle, but everyone knew what everyone else was doing at all times. When he built his lab at Menlo Park, the idea was that the lab would be 10 times as big as his prior lab, and would produce 10 times the number of inventions. No such luck. Because Edison insisted on being involved in all parts of the invention process, the work was no longer done in small, focused, close-knit teams, but was rather run from the top-down with him involved in every project. And innovation suffered. I thought it was really interesting to hear that one of America’s greatest inventors had difficulty letting innovation flourish in others. It may be that innovation only happens in small, independent teams. Can you think of some counter examples?

These are pictures I took of his lab in Florida, which kind of reminded me of my high school chemistry lab. (I did not go to high school in the 1940’s — my school was just that out-of-date! )