1. Managing social software applications in
the corporate and public sector
environments
Louise F. Spiteri
School of Information Management
Louise.Spiteri@dal.ca
Maritime Information Management
Day_2009

2. Definition of social software
CMS Watch (cmswatch.com) defines social software as:
“Tools for collaboration and networking within and beyond the
enterprise.”
Social software supports collaboration, knowledge creation, sharing
and publication, identifying experts and getting access to expert
opinions worldwide. It leaves the control of knowledge with the
individuals owning it.
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3. The push for social software
Today, employees looking for greater flexibility as well as support for
more ad-hoc processes are frequently using a more bottom-up
approach to electronic collaboration, in some cases circumventing
official information systems, using freely-available tools on the public
Web.
Exposure to technology and tools such as Facebook, iTunes,
YouTube, and Wikipedia, is raising the bar on use expectations
concerning interfaces, collaboration and content access, not only on
the Web, but on the intranet as well.
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4. Comparison of software
Traditional
Social
Start point: Project
Structure before use
Top down
Knowledge belongs to experts
Central control
Formal
Rigid
Slow
Expensive
Start point: Users
Structure emerges with use
Bottom up
Everyone is knowledgeable
User control
Informal & easy to use
Flexible
Quick
Free or inexpensive
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5. Importance of Enterprise 2.0 technologies
A 2008 survey of over 400 business conducted by the
Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM)
found that:
44% of respondents said that Enterprise 2.0 technologies are
“imperative” or of “significant importance” for their organization.
27% of respondents said that technologies such as RSS, blogs,
and wikis have an impact on business goals and success.
74% of the respondents, however, claim to have only a vague
familiarity with the technologies.
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6. Key areas of social software
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7. Examples of social software vendors
Social software suites
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•
•
•
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Drupal
Awareness Networks
Connectbeam
Jive Software
Traction Software
Blog software
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Public networks
•
Wiki software
•
Atlassian
Mediawiki
Socialtext
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SixApart
Automatic
Google Blogger
LinkedIn
Facebook
XING
http://www.cmswatch.com/social/vendors/
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8. Wikis
Wikis are primarily used for collaborative work on documents and
can be used for many different applications. Since the wikis are so
easy to use by people of all levels of technical expertise, the uses are
only limited by the end user’s imagination. Examples of Wiki
applications include:
Cooperative authoring environment
Rapid production of Web pages for subsequent publishing
Newsletters
Committee minutes
Technical documentation
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9. Potential drawbacks of Wikis
The major concern in the use of wikis is the validity of the information
that the various authors have added.
In the case of Wikipedia, if someone adds inaccurate information
others will correct the information.
In the enterprise, it is expected that the same thing will happen. Most
articles will be the best the end user can contribute, because they
would not want to ruin their reputation among colleagues and peers.
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10. Blogs
Enterprises can use blogs to create powerful knowledge bases of
company information and employee sharing and continual learning.
Companies can use blogs to communicate with employees and
customers.
Leaders can use their blogs to update employees.
Blogs can be used to replace email and can also provide an archive
of all communications.
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11. Potential drawbacks of Blogs
Blog risks include:
Copyright infringement
Invasion of privacy
Defamation, sexual harassment and other legal claims;
Trade secret theft, financial disclosures, and other security
breaches;
Productivity drains
Mismanagement of electronic business records
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12. Social tagging applications
Tagging has acquired popularity as a flexible approach to classifying
information. Tagging allows individuals to use their own terms to
describe a resource, without the need to select terms from a
taxonomy.
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13. Enterprise social bookmarking: Considerations
Corporate firewalls may prevent access to public bookmarking
resources to anyone outside the organization.
Public sharing of bookmarks to intranet resources may be of concern
as proprietary information could be leaked.
The success of internet-based social bookmarking , however,
suggests that enterprises or organizations would benefit from a social
bookmarking system. IBM, for example, has created its own internal
bookmarking system called Dogear.
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14. Enterprise social tagging applications
Social bookmarking can assist your enterprise by:
Providing research analysts with a place to share research findings
Helping to form and support social networks around interest areas
Enhancing the value of other information retrieval and aggregation
capabilities on your intranet
By using the emergent folksonomy to augment your corporate subject
taxonomy strategy
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15. Enterprise social tagging applications
The same tagging mechanism that is used in social
bookmarking sites could be modified for bookmarking
people in an enterprise:
Tagging may be an effective way to organize contacts
Social tags may inform others about someone’s interests, skills,
and expertise
People-tagging benefits from properties unique to the enterprise,
including a pre-populated directory.
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16. Enterprise social networking
An example of an enterprise social networking applications is
Beehive, developed for IBM employees to help connect with coworkers (used by 40,000 employees).
The intent of Beehive is to provide a Facebook-like environment,
geared more toward professional interaction, although personal
interaction is also a legitimate part of the experience.
Users can develop their profiles and post information, including a
"Hive Five" listing that describes the areas about which they are
passionate.
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17. Potential drawbacks of enterprise bookmarking
Polysemy: The tag port could refer to a sweet fortified wine, a porthole, a place
for loading and unloading ships, the left-hand side of a ship or aircraft, or a
channel endpoint in a communications system.
Idiosyncrasies: Some tags may have little meaning to anyone but their
creator, e.g., Neat_stuff; criggo
Variant spellings: humor, humour
Collapsing or awkward compound terms: e.g. starwars, star_wars
Singular and plural variants: comic, comics
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18. RSS feeds
With the creation of wikis, blogs, and enterprise bookmarking, and
tagging, new information is generated all of the time. The user will
find it hard to keep returning to all of the wikis, blogs, bookmarks, and
new tags that have been created.
Enterprise RSS may help solve the overload on infrastructure such
as email boxes and multiple user computers requesting feeds by
including feeds in an enterprise RSS product. The feeds are read by
an RSS feed reader server and then delivered to the user in an
enterprise, thus reducing network traffic.
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19. Information management concerns in an
Enterprise 2.0 environment
Protecting the security, accuracy, and integrity of the information.
Managing the creation, collection, storage, and dissemination of vast
amounts of unstructured and constantly changing information.
Controlling access to particular levels and types of information.
Assessing the legal implication of vast amounts of information in
scattered systems and databases.
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20. Information management policies
Before implementing any of the enterprise 2.0 applications, policies
should be written and reviewed with all employees, whether the
websites will be internal or external or both.
Copyright laws should be reviewed and a policy of no tolerance for
copyright infringement should be in place.
Develop comprehensive policies that ensure that IM or Web 2.0
applications are managed consistently across the agency.
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21. Information management policies
Address the authorized use of technology and provide guidelines for
the management of the records generated during the use of Blogs,
Wikis, etc.
Explain clearly that users may have no expectation of privacy.
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22. Compliance
The Canadian General Standards Board’ s Electronic Records as
Documentary Evidence (CAN/CGSB-72.34-2005) outlines the main
requirements for ensuring that electronic records generated from electronic
information systems are reliable, authentic and trustworthy.
CAN/CGSB-72.34-2005 is intended to assist both the public and private
sectors in meeting one of the evidentiary requirements for acceptance of
electronic records in legal proceedings.
Government of Canada. Canadian General Standards Board. (2006). CGSB releases new national
standard on electronic records as documentary evidence. Retrieved June 15, 2009, from
http://www.pwgsc.gc.ca/cgsb/info/news/calibre/011_001/article01-e.html
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