1. Employee-of-the-Month' Badge Unlocked!
Engaging Your Employees to Describe Enterprise
Data Semantically
Elena Simperl, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany & STI Innsbruck,
Austria
Germán Toro del Valle, Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo, Spain
Talk at SemTech 2011, London, UK
5/3/2012 www.insemtives.eu 1

2. The Semantic Enterprise
• Semantic solutions for enterprise knowledge
management enhance how
– Existing content and knowledge are used and
exploited (sometimes in novel, unexpected ways).
– Employees collaborate and interact within the
team and with customers.
• Applicable to ECM, CRM, SCM etc.

3. Semantic technologies are mainly
about automation
• But many tasks in semantic content authoring
fundamentally rely on human input.
– Modeling a domain.
– Understanding text and media content (in all their forms and
languages).
– Integrating data sources originating from different contexts.
• What motivates people to undertake such tasks?
• What rewards could be effective?
• How can an enterprise ensure that such tasks are
executed effectively?
– And the adoption of semantic technologies pays-off…

4. Incentives and motivators
• Incentives can be related to both extrinsic and
intrinsic motivations.
• Successful volunteer crowdsourcing is difficult to
predict or replicate.
– Highly context-specific, not applicable to arbitrary tasks.
• Reward models often easier to study and control.
– Different models: pay-per-time, pay-per-unit, winner-takes-it-
all.
– But assume performance can be reliably measured.
– Not always easy to abstract from social aspects (free-riding,
social pressure).
– May undermine intrinsic motivation.

5. Turn work into play
www.insemtives.eu 5

6. What makes game mechanics
successfull?*
• Accelerated feedback cycles.
– Annual performance appraisals vs immediate feedback to
maintain engagement.
• Clear goals and rules of play.
– Players feel empowered to achieve goals vs fuzzy, complex
system of rules in real-world.
• Compelling narrative.
– Gamification builds a narrative that engages players to
participate and achieve the goals of the activity.
• But in the end it’s about what task users want to get
better at.
*http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1629214
Images from http://gapingvoid.com/2011/06/07/pixie-dust-the-mountain-of-mediocrity/ and http://www.hideandseek.net/wp-
content/uploads/2010/10/gamification_badges.jpg

7. Guidelines
• Focus on the actual goal and incentivize related
actions.
– Write posts, create graphics, annotate pictures, reply
to customers in a given time…
• Build a community around the intended actions.
– Reward helping each other in performing the task and
interaction.
– Reward recruiting new contributors.
• Reward repeated actions.
– Actions become part of the daily routine.
Image from http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSzWEQdtagJy6lxiR2focH2D01Wpz7dzAilDuPsWnL0i4GAHgnm_0hyw3upqw

8. What tasks can be gamified?*
• Tasks that are decomposable into simpler
tasks, nested tasks.
• Performance is measurable.
• Obvious rewarding scheme.
• Skills can be arranged in a smooth learning
curve.
*http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/06/what-actitivies-that-can-be-turned-into.html
Image from http://www.powwownow.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/gamification.jpeg

9. What is different about semantic
systems?
• It‘s still about the context
of the actual application.
• User engagement with
semantic tasks in order to
– Ensure knowledge is
relevant and up-to-date.
– People accept the new
solution and understand its
benefits.
– Avoid cold-start problems.
– Optimize maintenance
costs.

10. Enterprise Knowledge
Management at Telefónica
• Services: • Metrics:
– Bank of Ideas – 1200 employees
– Blogs – 7 cities / 3 countries (↑)
– Corporate Directories – ˜3050 visits per day
– Document management. – ˜56000 page views
(impressions) per day
– Forums
– Average visit time: 20’
– News
• Main consequence:
– Pilot/Product/Service
Catalogues – Alternatives means to get
what we are looking for
– Search engines
– Wikis
– …

11. OKenterprise annotation tool

12. Incentive 1: Reputation
• Reputation is very powerful motivation in an enterprise.
• Show benefit of annotations  expert network based on the
annotations.

13. Incentive 2: Competition/Rewards
• Everyone (even employees ;-) ) like to play and to compete
• ... and win prizes in return

14. Incentive 3: Fun
• Making everyday‘s tasks more fun

15. Incentive 4: Public good
• Getting profit out of everyone‘s contributions

16. Thank you
elena.simperl@kit.edu,
elena.simperl@sti2.at
gtv@tid.es