Turning workplaces into
smart spaces
Hemma Kocher, www.headshift.com,
hemma@headshift.com
June 2007 - Microlearning2007, Innsbruck

About Headshift
headshift
is a social software consulting and
development group who apply emerging
tools and ideas to the real-world needs
of organisations:
consulting & engagement
prototyping and experimentation
development and integration

What’s happening today
• We are wasting a lot of brainpower in organisations
• We are wasting a lot of time with e-mails and in meetings

Knowledge
• ‘Knowledge is not a tree, but a pile of leaves.’
• New problems, new challenges, new ideas

Better and more opportunities to...
• Talk to each other and share expertise
• Ask questions
• Get a group together to find an answer or solution for a problem
• Observe and watch what and how other people do things
• Browse and search for answers
• Create and produce something together
• Compare different ideas
• Invent
• Explore a new territory
• Encounter tacit knowledge

Better and more opportunities to...
Learn from each other!

Social software
• Is people driven
• Lightweight
• Makes information and people find you

Key elements of ‘enterprise 2.0’
• Social tools (blog, wiki, tagging, bookmarking, IM)
• An ecosystem of data (RSS, microformats, APIs)
• Subscription and aggregation (feeds, people, places
• Participatory culture (co-production, discussion)
• Social search

Collaborative, community based learning
• Learning is problem and content driven
• Organising knowledge that is significant and relevant
to people
• Discussion and reflection
• Co-production
• Personalised formal and informal knowledge and
learning spaces

Towards collaborative intelligence
• Communities of practice
• Networked individualism

Some concrete use cases
• Information and knowledge sharing
• Collaboration in and between teams
• Innovation and R&D
• Internal communication
• Social networks and communities

Information and knowledge sharing

Information and knowledge sharing
NHSi Knowledge sharing network
• Knowledge sharing communities
based around clinical networks

Information and knowledge sharing

Information and knowledge sharing

Information and knowledge sharing

Information and knowledge sharing
Group-based informal knowledge
sharing within a large law firm
• Blended social tools for group-
based collaboration, awareness and
co-production of documents

Collaboration within teams

Collaboration within teams
Worldwide Business Unit within BP
• Blogs, wikis, social bookmarking and
personal profiles to create better
awareness of what people are doing

Innovation and R&D

Innovation and R&D
Innovation Network for Marketing
• Wiki-based idea generation, blog, video
interviews and podcasts to identify and
promote innovation

Internal communication

Internal communication
Wiki-based Intranet
• The Commission for Rural
Communities uses a wiki as its
Intranet platform to encourage
greater participation

Social networks and communities

Social networks and communities
Distributed learning community
• Young entrepreneurs using a wiki-
based learning community to overcome
physical distance

Networked individualism

Building a better personal radar
• Build a better radar, use social tools and trust to make decisions
• More peripheral, contextual information flows
• Less dependency on e-mail
• Better findability, not storage

Sharing = scaling and...
...building trust

Software is not enough
To reach second wave adopters, we need to create
‘situated’ applications that are mapped to existing
practice in order to make them relevant & contextual.
Engaging people with new ways of working is not easy.

Learning ≠ training
• Structured training and object based learning are
suited for repetitive jobs
• Learning is about connections and content
• IT systems need to augment, not manage learning.

We live, we learn
• Learning is interaction
• Learning is social

And what about...
• Time
• Resistance
• Tool competency
• Information literacy
• Different learner types
• Changing the workplace - changes in
behaviour

Thank you!
Photos courtesy of Flickr using Creative Commons license
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kokogiak/6274404/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/victoriapeckham/164175205/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/markrjones/47761183/
http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=52759426
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tedguy49/250658182/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dcjohn/74907741/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/arbron/77094898/
http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=54539889
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sgt_spanky/35811144/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/backpackphotography/257026830/
http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=123147019&size=o
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brianboulos/36957265/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/violator3/93589371/
http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=205125227&size=m
http://flickr.com/photos/28329123@N00/392316333/
http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=557730963&size=m
http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=97828474&size=l
http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=465436083&size=l
This presentation was not for direct commercial use, but if any photographer
objects to the inclusion of their material then we shall happily remove it.