The document discusses incentivizing employees to undertake semantic annotation tasks within an enterprise. It outlines how game mechanics like feedback, clear goals, compelling narratives, and skill-based progression can motivate employees. Specific incentive ideas for semantic annotation include: (1) using reputation systems to highlight experts, (2) holding competitions with prizes to encourage participation, (3) introducing fun elements to routine tasks, and (4) emphasizing that contributions benefit the public good of the organization. The document also provides an example of semantic annotation tools and metrics from Telefonica.

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