Factors to Consider When Choosing Accounts Payable Services Providers.pptx
Cscw08 workshop dejin (1)
1. Micro-blogging - potential impacts on
informal communication and
collaborative work
Dejin Zhao & Mary Beth Rosson
Penn State University
dzhao,mrosson@ist.psu.edu
3. Micro-blogging
What is a micro-blog?
• A new emerging form of communication, powered by online CMC tools
(e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, Pownce)
• Allow individuals to broadcast information through brief updates
• With their audience/subscribers (e.g., friends, colleagues, other interested
observers) [3].
Unique communication behaviors: people seem to use micro-blog to share
information about themselves that they probably won’t do through other
communication media
• Small little things, happening around people’s daily life and work activities
• Live information, e.g., what they are doing, thinking, reading, and
experiencing
• They believe are interesting and might be valuable to others as well, but
just not enough to share through other communication channels (e.g.,
emails, IMs, or blogs).
Emotionally, people achieve greater cyberspace presence, “out there”, and
feel one more layer of connection with others and the world [3, 5].
4. Micro-blogging in work settings
Position: Micro-blog might potential become an important informal
communication medium at work, with consequent mediating impacts on
collaborative work.
Problems and needs: Corporate settings need better CMC support of informal
communication among employees more than ever
Informal communication is critical to collaborative work and organization success
(e.g., opportunistic valuable information sharing, common ground,
connectedness) [7]
Less informal communication opportunities, as communication patterns shifts
from primarily FTF communication to more online mediated communication (e.g.,
more work done remotely, time famine, and concerns of interruptions)
Computer-mediated informal communication essential as part of this, but still an
open research problem
E.g., social/visual cues in CMC seems not to help much [8].
Other efforts examining social networking and public displays within organizations
Two classes of anticipated impacts of micro-blogging:
• Informational effects: improved opportunistic valuable information sharing and
expertise seeking, building and maintaining common ground
• Social and emotional effects: enhancing the feeling of connectedness among co-
workers.
5. Pilot project: an interview Study
To investigate the questions of: a) how people micro-blog at work, b) what
consequential effects micro-blogging have or might have on collaborative
work, and c) how it might be improved?
Semi-structured interviews with participants (expected 20 people), from a large
software R&D Business Unit, with roles of both managers and workers in
software engineering, product management, marketing , and sales.
About the interview questions:
- Participants are asked about their experiences using Twitter with co-
workers
- Problems and issues encountered, opinions and anticipated feature needs
either/or relevant to work.
- Questions asked from both information sender and receiver perspective
- Participants asked more generally about their perceptions of micro-blogs,
compared with other communication media available
6. Preliminary findings:
Consequences of Twitter use
• Opportunistic valuable information sharing: a segment marketing
manager once posted about his bad luck of setting demos in a marketing
event, others respond similar experiences, and one of the guys organized
an further meeting to exchange and learn from each other’s experiences.
• Work-related info/articles sharing: marketing people often post work
related news, product managers post about new features of competitors or
other relevant products.
• Common ground building : people replying to a co-worker’s
updates/opinions sometimes are just for alerting him/her that they read it, or
agree with the opinions.
• Perceptions of others’ work: a product manager needs to collaborate with
a marketing guy in a new project. By reading their work-related updates in
Twitter, he gains insights into how their teams work.
7. Preliminary findings:
Technological affordances
Broadcasting and voluntary reading
- Makes it easier for users to share information that they probably
would not do otherwise
- Fulfill people’s needs of checking others’ status, reading and
responding is not demanded, subscribe based on interests, reply
if they find topics interesting or have sth to share
Simple, easy, and pervasive access
- Reduce threshold (low cost) to share
- Update as things happening and thoughts crossing minds
- Check whenever they get a moment (e.g., in-between meetings)
8. Preliminary findings:
Issues and problems
Privacy: some people concerned about broadcasting
social or work status to everyone on their follower list
Security: some people said he might post more client
and task sensitive information to an internal micro-blog,
and would want to see similar posts from others.
Integration: people would like to have a more integrated
way to stay in touch with people inside and outside
organization
e.g., co-workers, clients and sales partners, other friends in the
same industry
Value: people sometimes not sure what might be
interesting to update for subscribers, especially at start
9. Discussion: future research
• Academia investigation of micro-blogging as a social activity
What is motivation for micro-blogging (e.g., social emotional needs,
individual/culture/background difference factors)?
What are its consequential effects (both cognitive and emotional effects in
both individual and group levels)
What are the technological affordances of communication channel and how
do they relate to people’s usage and needs?
• Further investigation of corporate micro-blogging subject to
implementation inside the organizations
Use and impacts likely also to be affected by the specific organizational
settings (e.g., organizational structure, communication structure,
organizational culture, nature of work activities, and individual differences)
• In a word, micro-blogging could become a useful medium for supporting
informal intra-organization communication across different organizational
levels.
The nature of status updating might enact a variety of communication needs
at work
May impact other organizational issues (e.g., job satisfaction, creativity and
innovation, and strategic management).
11. Reference
1. Geyer, W., Dugan, C., DiMicco, J., Millen, D., Brownholtz, B., & Muller, M. (2008).
Use and reuse of shared lists as a social content type. In Proc. CHI 2008, Florence,
Italy, 1545-1554
2. Jackson, A., Yates, J., & Orlikowski, W. (2007). Corporate blogging: Building
community through persistent digital talk. In Proc. 40th HICSS, Jan., 2007.
3. Java, A., Song, X., Finin, T. & Tseng, B. (2007). Why we twitter: Understanding
microblogging usage and communities. In Proc. 13th ACM SIGKDD, August 12–15,
San Jose, CA.
4. Joinson, A.N. (2008). Looking at, looking up or keeping up with people: motives
and use of facebook. In Proc. CHI 2008, Florence, Italy, 1027-1036
5. McFedries, P. (2007). Technically speaking: All atwitter. IEEE Spectrum, 44(10),
84.
6. Nardi, B.A., Schiano, D.J. & Gumbrecht, M. (2004). Blogging as social activity, or,
would you let 900 million people read your diary? In Proc. CSCW 2004. New York:
ACM Press, pp. 222–231.
7. Whittaker, S., Frohlich, D. & Daly-Jones, W. (1994). Informal Workplace
Communication: What is it Like and How Might We Support It? Proceedings of
CHI’94, 131-137, ACM Press: New York.
8. Whittaker, S. (2003). Theories and Methods in Mediate Communication. In
http://www.research.att.com/~stevew/cmc-chapter.doc.pdf
Editor's Notes
I will talk about micro-blogging and its potential impacts on informal communication and collaborative work
Just to give everyone a little bit overview, I will start with micro-blog, and why I think it’s important to study the impacts on informal communication at work. After that I will talk a little bit about the interview study I am conducting, preliminary findings so far, and at the end, some of my thoughts for us to discuss about.
First, Can I ask people here, how many of you use Twitter?
Great! I am still working on my interview study, so I may interview some of you after this, I hope you not say no to me .
I believe most of us here are very familiar with Twitter and Facebook Status Feeds. Though little academia research study about micro-blog, people can found many news and articles talking about twitter and micro-blog on the Internet.
So what is micro-blog, here is a working definition based on information from Internet and prior relevant research. Micro-blog is emerging form of communication, enable individuals to broadcast information through simple updates to their audience/subscribers (including their friends, colleagues, and other interested observers)
There are many articles talking about what people twitter about and why they twitter. A unique behavior that I noticed is that, Micro-blog allows users to share information that they probably won’t through other communication media, such as small little things happen in people’s daily life. This type of information are often live information, such as what they are doing, reading, thinking, and experiencing, information that they believe are interesting and might also be valuable for others, however they might not bother to share with others through other manners of communication, such as through emails, IM, or weblogs. Emotionally, people seem to use micro-blog to achieve a level of cyberspace presence, being “out there” and feel another layer of connection with others and the world around their life.
This unique phenomenon makes me think of its potential connection with informal communication at work. And my position here is that Micro-blog might have potential to become an new informal communication medium at work, so as to have mediating impacts on collaborative work.
Informal communication has been suggested crucial important to collaborative work and organizations’ success. The water-cooler scenarios showed us that informal information exchange in such impromptu conversations plays an important role for collaborative work among knowledge co-workers and enhancing creativity and innovation for organizations that rely on knowledge economy.
Communication patterns have shifted from primarily face-to-face communication to more online communication in IM, emails, and other CMC tools; As more and more collaboration can be done remotely through CMC support, there are relatively less opportunities for face-to-face informal conversations. As more and more of us suffer from time-famine, people become more concerned of interruptions along with convenience brought by IMs and Emails. We need better CMC supports of informal communication more than ever, but this is still an open research problem. Adding social/visual cues in CMC seems not to help much. Other recent efforts including social networking and public displays within organizations.
At the same time, the popular behaviors of sharing whereabouts and status updates in micro-blogs shows micro-blog’s potentials to support mediated informal communication and keeping in touch among co-workers. Two classes of anticipated impacts are informational effects including increased opportunistic valuable information sharing, expertise realizing, building and maintaining common ground; social and emotional effects is mainly enhancing the feeling of connectedness among co-workers.
I am conducting an interview study to investigate the questions of a) how people micro-blog at work, b) what consequential effects micro-blogging have or might have on collaborative work, and c) how it might be improved?
A semi-structured interview study is designed to interview about 20 people from who twitter with co-workers. The participants are selected from a large software R&D business unit including managers and workers in software engineering, product management, marketing , and sales group.
Participants are asked about their experiences of using Twitter with co-worker, problems and issues encountered, opinions and anticipated feature needed either/or relevant to work. Questions were asked from both information sender and receiver perspectives. Participants are also asked more generally about their perceptions of micro-blogs, compared with other communication media available.
We found that micro-blogging helps opportunistic valuable information sharing and prompting further informal conversations among co-workers. A segment marketing manager said that he once posted a tweet about his bad luck of setting a demo in a marketing event, that he would rather not to bother to send through email or IMs to co-workers, later on he get responds from co-workers in remote sites with similar experiences, and one of the guys even initiated an further conference call to learn from each other’s experiences.
Other findings include that Micro-blogs help to share work-related information and expertise. Marketing people often post work related news, product managers post a lot about new features and products of their competitors.
Common ground building : some people said that they reply to a co-worker’s updates/opinions sometimes are just for alerting him/her that they have read it, or agree with them in some extent.
Micro-blog also helps develop people’s perceptions of others’ work: a product manager said that he had a project needs to collaborate with a marketing team that he didn’t have experience about before. By reading their work-related updates in Twitter, he gains insights into how their teams work.
Here are some preliminary findings of technological affordances. Some of them are consistent with prior research in blogs.
The nature of broadcasting and voluntary reading in micro-blog makes it easier for users to broadcast information about themselves that they probably wouldn’t do otherwise. This technology affordance also fulfill people’s needs of checking others’ status. Their reading and responding is not demanded, people choose to subscribe based on their interests, and reply if they find topics interesting or have something to share.
Another important characteristic of Twitter is that it is simple, easy, and pervasive. These features help reduce people’s threshed to share information, allow them to update as things happening and ideas and thoughts crossing their minds. It also make the communication easy to manage. Some people said they usually check on others updates whenever they get a moment, such as in-between meetings, but not necessarily interrupt their current work tasks.
Some issues and problems are also found valuable to technology improvement.
Privacy issue: some people concerned about broadcasting social or work status to everyone on their follower list, sometimes they would prefer to update different updates to different groups.
Security issue: due to twitter is a public service, some people said they would like to post more client and task sensitive information to an internal micro-blog, and would want to see similar posts from others.
Integration issue: people expressed that even if there is an internal secure micro-blog tool, they would also like a more integrated way to stay in touch with people inside and outside organization e.g., co-workers inside the organization, clients and sales partners, other friends in the same industry outside the organization
Finally, people sometimes not sure what might be interesting to update for their subscribers, especially at start
Here are some of my thoughts about future research work
We still lack of academia investigation of Micro-blogging as a social activity: we still know little about a) motivation of micro-blogging (e.g., social emotional needs, individual/culture/background difference factors), b) we still know little about its consequential effects (both cognitive and emotional effects in both individual and group levels). We want to understand more about what are the technological affordances of this communication channel and how they relate to people’s usage and needs?
Further investigation of corporate micro-blogging is still subject to actual implementation inside the organizations. Its use and impacts will be dramatically affected by the specific organizational settings (e.g., organizational structure and culture, nature of work activities, and job and individual differences)
In a word, micro-blog could potentially become a useful medium for employee communication across various organizational levels. The nature of status broadcasting might enact a variety of communication needs at work. I believe that its potential adoption in corporate will have critical impacts on various organizational issues (e.g., job satisfaction, creativity and innovation, and strategic management).