Social Technologies

Literature & personal standpoint

There seem to be several words referring to the notion of ‘Social technologies’ including Social Computing and Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is described as second generation internet. It has also been referred to as ‘Wisdom Web’, people-centric web, participative web and read/write Web’. ‘It’s a collection of technologies, business strategies and social trends’ (Murugesan, 2007)
Either way they are words which have been chosen to best describe the vast array of social technologies there out there are at the moment. ‘The Many Forms of Social Computing’ is a diagram which describes and lists examples of these.

Murugesan took an in depth look at several social technologies. Describing how they work and how they can be used. Murugesan believes that “Web 2.0 can help businesses in product development, market research, competative intelligence gathering, and revenue generation” However Murugesan believes that “We need to rethink Web application development methods in light of Web 2.0 Addressing the issues of scalability, performance, and security”. I found it useful that as well as identifying these excellent advantages of Social Technologies Murugesan also picks out imperative implications that all organisations will need to look closely at if choosing to implement a change in the way of working using Social Technologies.

Pascu et al wrote a paper looking into the implications of Social Computing. They describe Social Computing as a trend which “exploit fully the connectivity dimension of the internet to support the networking of people and content. In addition the user is an active participant, co-producing content, taste and relevance, reputation/feedback, storage /server capacity, connectivity and collective intelligence”. (Pascu, Osimo, Geomina, Ulbrich, Punie, & Burgelman, 2008). I am particularly fond of this definition of Social Computing. It fully encapsulates the meaning of ‘Social’ in the context of computing and technologies. Even if these technologies are applied in an organisation, from this description there is the distinct idea that the larger emphasis is on individual or personal as opposed to organisational input, which will all contribute to the overall rich mix of knowledge that will be accessible to all employees though these technologies.

They go on to analyse growth and trends of these technologies and how they are affecting how people “find information, learn, share communicate and consume and the way businesses do business”. (Pascu, Osimo, Geomina, Ulbrich, Punie, & Burgelman, 2008) Although Pascu et al’s paper mainly aims to look at the implications of Social Computing on business they make some practical descriptions and identify useful effects of Social Computing that make you aware of the wider implications of Social Computing. They identify useful growth trends in “Blogs, for example, have doubled every five months for the last two years” emphasising the astonishing rate at which the next generation of Web is catching on. People want to get involved, they realise that they no longer only have to be the dormant consumer but also the provider if they want to challenge information that they disagree with or feel they want to share new knowledge.

Pascu et al’s research finds that “Social Networking websites are the most visited websites in terms of page views, and the largest part of internet traffic by far is peer-to-peer file sharing” (Pascu, Osimo, Geomina, Ulbrich, Punie, & Burgelman, 2008). This is not surprising as Facebook for example has often been referred to in the media as addictive with some places of work making the decision in 2007 to ban it in the work place when productivity and quality of work began to be comprimised.

Pascu et al also interestingly talks about the traditional user. The “Lurker”. These users do not produce content or proactively contribute, however with web 2.0 technologies just the actuality of a user coming to read or buy an item creates useful data and trends. For example websites such as Amazon or iTunes that collect data about user shopping habits creates reccomendations for the next user so in effect the “Luker” is inactivley contributing. E.g. On iTunes if you search for an album you are automatically presented with recommendations based upon other similar customer shopping habits “Listeners also bought xxx “

Yang et al wrote an interesting paper on how social technologies can be used in education. In fact they developed what is part of the paper title, a “Web 2.0 Social Software for Enhancing Knowledge Sharing in Communities of Practice” (Yang, Chen, & Su, 2007). The software that they developed was called PAMS (Personalised Annotation Management System) which they conducted an experiment with. I found this article very interesting, this was mainly because I could relate to the idea of students trying to interact, communicate and collaborate about something, in my case Knowledge Management Strategies.

Yang et al write about establishing what the roles of the people are with the knowledge as opposed to it happening naturally as per with the general public on the internet. They want to “identify co-learners to facilitate communication and collaboration” (Yang, Chen, & Su, 2007). These are facilitated Social Technologies for the purpose of education. This is Similar to the way in which we had to set up blogs and interact with each other for the purpose of our module. The concept of a facilitator ensures that interaction is encouraged and the full potential of the tools are exploited. Without this employees for example that are presented with Social Technology Tools may not see the benefits of the implementation and subsequent maintenance of such a concept in the first place.

Yang et al indicate that the students that they have written the software for are already a formed Community of Practice (CoP), a concept which I have defined and discussed in a previous post. This software is therefore supporting an infrastructure that already exists. They merely want to use this software to enhance and support existing Knowledge Sharing, for “commenting, knowledge articulation and exertion” (Yang, Chen, & Su, 2007).

Through the implementation of this technology students raised questions and prompted each other’s learning positively which is what Yang et al primarily wanted to assess, whether the technology could help enable students to “raise good questions and provide answers through the practice of reading, commenting, reviewing and discussion” (Yang, Chen, & Su, 2007). As well as the setting being similar to that of my current academic situation the PAMS system also sounded like a very similar concept to a blog in a CoP where knowledge sharing is encouraged and members are empowered by the knowledge disseminating tools.

Yang et el value the use of annotations. They believe that “Annotation is an explicit expression of knowledge in the forms of comments which reveals conceptual meanings of annotators’ implicit thought” (Yang, Chen, & Su, 2007). I think that this paragraph sums up the usefulness of social technologies such as blogs. Due to the nature of the content that a blog is capable of holding, much of the ‘in the head’ knowledge that was difficult to share in the past is now much easier to record and share and if there is a misunderstanding of the individuals ‘explicitly expressed implicit thought’ then the reader or co-author simply need question or comment in response to the active author.

The outcome of this experiment was that students that had utilised PAMS scored higher on a content related test than those who had not. “This demonstrates that using PAMS to comment, discuss, and raise question-answers do improve students’ reading comprehension” (Yang, Chen, & Su, 2007) Thus I believe this indicates that social technologies are useful in aiding knowledge management though questioning and discussion which aids to reinforce, reiterate and builds upon viewpoints that would already exist in a technology-less CoP.

Theory In Action

My organisation tends to have employees who often take advice or sources of information literally unless specifically told to treat it otherwise. Social Technologies may have to come with a warning e.g. please note that this blog is the opinion of that of the writer only and does not reflect that of the organisation. Conversely this may cause employees to shy away from the technology if they believe that they are not supported by their organisation in following their peers’ practices or advice. An alternative could be that of the approach taken by Wikipedia, where the technology within the organisation is self regulated. With feedback, ratings of how useful the item was and judgements about what the item may have lacked to focus on are left behind.

I believe that blogs could quite easily be introduced in my organisation linking specialism’s in a way that has never been done before, but would they actually be used? I think that it would be useful for employees to blog their general experiences of (a minimum of) monthly work life as a way of personally reflecting and expressing themselves. It would also form a useful contribution to annual appraisals to reflect upon feelings, milestones, improvements and knowledge contributions to the organisation. Employees would have to be encouraged to read and comment on other blogs (again at least one comment per month) on order to form CoPs. This would gently ease employees into the world of blogging without the risk of it turning into a ‘moan forum’ as the posts will contribute to the employees’ appraisal. The same approach could possibly be taken with other social technologies i.e. number of wiki edits contributed or hits your blog has had. This would again be Incentive related, so the more you contribute the more you would be rewarded in your knowledge contribution and performance related pay.

A User review portal is another technology that I think could be used to specifically allow employees to look at reviews to HR policies and procedures and maybe even allow employees to make recommendations. At the moment policies and procedures sit on the intranet. They are in danger of going out of date and not changing with legislation or general change with the organisations strategic objectives. I am sure that with something like this in place employees will feel more empowered and in line with our move to internal consultancy, give employees more accountability and power.

Podcasts are very useful little tools! We currently use a video conferencing facility to link up to the other regions of the organisation. Why not record (sound, picture or both) these meetings instead of taking minutes of them? It would save time and be a much richer source of information. Manager with smart phones could also watch or listen to these on the go. I think that the use of photos, videos and sound generally are a better way to distribute knowledge as it emulates what we do as humans when passing on information, which is better than misinterpreted notes on paper! These podcasts could be in an area on the intranet available for employees to download. This is also a useful way of ensuring that employees are well informed. Higher level meetings for example have a minute taker and the notes are made available to all employees, but it is time consuming and often employees find minutes boring to read. This would engage many more employees.

A social networking tool for me is the icing on the cake for an organisation in optimising its Knowledge Management. There are in fact possible plans for my organisation to implement Microsoft SharePoint. If implemented main features such as Document Management and numerous collaboration features could be utilised. I see this primarily targeting and resolving the existing problem of management of imperative knowledge leaving the organisation when an employee leaves. This platform could replace personal hard drives which are often seen as an archive of non interpretable files once the employee has left. This would ensure more retrievable and valuable data is where it needs to be found, when it needs to be found, reducing the number of days it takes to rebuild key knowledge crucial to carrying out particular jobs. Of course this is only one way in which SharePoint can help the organisation with its Knowledge Management. There will need to be a close look at what the business crucial knowledge is and how best to utilise this software to aid regeneration, innovation, conservation and empowerment of knowledge to the employees who need it most.

The examples of Social Technologies I have just provided are only a few of those that could be applied in my organisation, there are many others that could be implemented specifically in the Human Resources team to help organise, disseminate and evolve knowledge which I hope to explore further at a later date e.g. tagging, wikis and RSS.

Reflection & Collective Learning

In discussion with the class of Knowledge Management Strategies we spoke about the different terminology used to refer to the concept of Social Technologies, what it is exactly and how it enables People to People interaction as opposed to just business to people. We even spoke about how this may be implemented into an organisation (in theory). In hindsight we identified that we failed to bring this information to life and talk about a specific instances of problems that could be resolved as a result of Social Technologies. Upon reflection it is easy to see that, yes this is what this module ‘Knowledge Management Strategies’ and the learning approach adopted is all about, sharing your experiences and embracing others, though it is not as easy as it sounds. Many of us found it difficult to give ‘valuable’ knowledge back to the class. This presents us a perfect example of how organisations could run into the same or similar problems. What defines a good blog or a good C2C communication? What if content on a wiki is poorly written or wrong? Do there need to be trained standards, Administrators, Specialists or Super Users for guidance or can anyone help us in our search of further knowledge?