Communote at Communardo - Enterprise Microblogging Case Study
hideCompany information and case study background
Communardo Software GmbH in Dresden, Germany offers software solutions and consultancy in the context of knowledge management and team collaboration. The company has been growing sharply during recent years and has about 160+ employees. For the most part the employees work in negeriads.com solusi berpromosi knowledge-intensive project contexts with flat hierarchies. The internal IT environment contains group-supporting applications like an intranet wiki, blogs and project spaces.
As Communardo itself is a vendor and consultancy in the area of Web 2.0 its employees are affiliated with the early adopters of new web services. Some of them tried Twitter and real- ised its potential to improve their collaboration at work. In spring 2008 they suggested using Twitter or a Twitter-like tool for the company’s project teams. Until then broad email conversations or the usage of the wiki’s discussion pages were common and lead to a large number of unmanageable information silos. The anticipation of the benefits of microblog- ging was that it would reconnect different parts of the company which were separated during its growth and that it would be the best tool for representing the flow of information in the project teams (providing a “single point of truth”).
The initial decision was against using a public microblogging service like Twitter for internal use. The reasons for this were the perceived functional deficits (e.g. no rights management, few possibilities for search and filtering) and strategic reasons (data protection, security of investment and reliability). Since there were no solutions for enterprise microblogging available at this time, the only fast and easy way to set up a microblogging-type system was the use of the blogging software Wordpress enhanced with a special theme called Prologue. This setting was tested in a project team. The approach in general was found very Indonesia Furniture Handicraft Wholesale Marketplace useful, and hence it was adopted company-wide. However, the modified Wordpress did not ultimately meet functional expectations.
Conceptualisation and Implementation
Communardo formulated the following requirements for its internal microblogging tool:
- Topic-centred content structuring and rights management should be available.
- Information management should be possible through tagging and filtering.
- Various integration scenarios should be supported (LDAP, RSS, portlets, mobile client, XMPP, corporate identity).
- Security features like encryption, user management and robust software design should be included.
- The system should be easy and fast to use
The first requirement represented a remarkable difference from the example of Twitter. It was argued that the so-called noise postings – which are not relevant for the user but because of their quantity hide important ones – should be minimised. A topic-centred structuring was also seen as the condition for effective rights management. The assumption behind this was that each person acts in different roles, such as project manager and CEO. So it should be conceivable that project-relevant postings by each person would be accessible only to co- workers involved in the same project. The possibility of establishing rights settings for every single posting, however, was rejected in favour of simplicity. Thus, the solution was the conceptualisation of multiple microblogs where single users could be added.
The approach was implemented in a non-functional user interface prototype. In this early stage of the project special usability consultants were asked to test the prototype including different versions of tagging. The aim of these tests was to find out if the handling would be intuitive. The findings were used to rework the first concept.
After the conceptualisation phase Communardo decided to move on and started the implementation phase. The technological planning took place parallel to the screen design. The project team kept the iterative proceeding and published the resulting tool as quickly as was possible. This is what we are going to describe in the next paragraphs.
The resulting software artefact
The resulting software artefact is a browser-based microblogging system. It uses Web 2.0- typical technology (i.e. Ajax) and design. Communardo chose the name “Communote”– a combination of the company’s name and the word “note”. (http://www.communote.com)
http://www.humannetworkcompetence.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/communote_neu-300x265.png
At first glance Communote looks similar to Twitter. In fact the key elements are the same: the posting stream is the major part of the system and a panel with filtering and navigation options is situated on the right. A major difference is the drop-down list on the top. This UI element is used to choose the microblog in which to post. The first page shows a combined view of all postings from one user’s microblogs. To post a message the user has to either choose a single microblog using the drop-down list or reply to an existing message. In the first case it is one additional click compared to Twitter, in the second case there is no extra effort.
The panel on the right contains a dynamic tag cloud and additional filtering possibilities. Filters are available for tags, free search, authors, microblogs and time periods. They can be combined freely. Every filter combination is also available via an RSS feed.
Rollout and Usage
The first postings are dated the end of September 2008. Communote was published internally as quickly as possible and was available to everyone via the existing LDAP logins. The tool was not promoted, nor were there training sessions. Usage adoption started with the project team itself and expanded virally throughout the company.
In February 2009, 57 users were registered with Communote. They had created 109 microblogs and posted 3,519 messages since September 2008.
Figure 2 shows different user profiles in the system: The majority of users post, on average, one to ten messages per week, power users up to 35 postings. Approximately one third of the user base writes less than one posting per week. As our interviews show these users do not necessarily refuse to use Communote. On the contrary many say that they use the microblogging system quite often. However, they are mostly passive users and do not actively contribute to a great extent.
There is an anecdote from the Communote project which aptly describes the operating principle of enterprise microblogging. With a view to the imminent launch of the service for external customers3 the head of the project assigned a lawyer to the formulation of the terms of service and the privacy policy, but did not consider that the two documents should also be available in English. The error would normally only have been discovered days later when the documents would be needed. The use of microblogging led instead to the following dialogue:
16:41, User A (project manager): "Telephone call with #attorney: ... concerning #termsofuse, #privacy: draft by friday, coordination on Sunday, fine tuning monday ..."
16:52, User B (team member): "@UserA: Does the # attorney consider an English version necessary as well?"
There are a number of similar cases concerning the use of microblogging at Communardo. What most of them have in common is that the crucial input comes from colleagues that normally – in the case of email or direct communication – would not have been informed or included. In the following we want to sum up some lessons learned from the development, implementation and deployment.
Lessons Learned
Only a few months after deployment Communote is considered to be the central information and communication channel within the company. Communardo calls it an efficient alterna- tive to email for internal communications. Furthermore, a general awareness of the activities, thoughts and feelings of the co-workers has been established. Surprisingly, the use of Communote doesn’t seem to kill informal small talk during coffee breaks. In fact it is reported that microblogging has enriched these talks as they quite often begin with “I have read in Communote that you...”.
One of the project’s lessons is that microblogging cannot be taught. Every user has to find out how he or she wants to use the system. Crucial to the sustainable use of the service seems to be intrinsic motivation. This arises only when the user is convinced of its benefit. Early adopters at Communardo were in particular those employees who already had experience with Twitter. Other users tested the tool and gathered experience “tweet by tweet”. In this context it can be considered important that the users had the ability to test the functionalities informally. This also applies to secondary functions such as tagging.
Another lesson learned concerns the adoption of public internet technologies. Remarkably, it was discovered that some users already using Twitter had difficulties with Communote, resulting from the unfamiliar concept of different microblogs to post in as well as the rights- management issues. It was therefore important to Communardo that these users were in- formed that Communote would not be a “Twitter for the enterprise”, but an enterprise mi- croblogging system. This changed their perceptions of the system and let them understand its concept more fully.
The presented case is still at an early stage and further questions can be raised after Communote’s usage has settled. Future research could specifi- cally address the efficiency of microblogging (awareness vs. time & effort) and a comparison with other enterprise microblogging tools in order to identify best practises and generalise our results.
This case study appeared originally in:
(Wandke, H.): Proceedings Mensch und Computer 2009, Oldenbourg, Berlin.
Martin Böhringer, Alexander Richter (2009): Adopting Social Software to the Intranet: A Case Study on Enterprise Microblogging
More Information about this case
Jens Osthues
Communardo Software GmbH
Human Network Competence
Kleiststraße 10a
D-01129 Dresden, Germany
Fon: +49.351.83382-270
Fax: +49.351.83382-299
Mail: jens.osthues@communardo.de
follow me: www.twitter.com/jeos
The original case study can be found also at: http://bit.ly/2NtS0d
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