Thursday 4 February 2010

Positive Network Effects - Benefits of Web 2.0


Hello world! My first blog where I'm practising what I seem to be preaching. Using web 2.0 (Facebook, twitter, Blogger, wikipedia etc.) for collaboration purposes. I want to find how we can best harness the "Wisdom of Crowds" phenomena where a groups collective decisions are superior to that of an 'expert'.

I am a final year student studying an ICT degree and my dissertation for the final year project has the above title. I feel passionately about this subject and I'm hoping some of you who are at the forefront of web 2.0. will back up the theories proposed.

I aim to use this as a discussion forum to support my research and case studies. This first post is to gain ideas and input from others and to some extent, test web 2.0 potential as a research and collaboration tool. Case studies will be done on the following organisations and if you have worked or work in any of these please feel free to add anything you think would help;

  • Local/National government
  • The BBC or other broadcaster/entertainment
  • Large technology company like Cisco or Microsoft
  • The NHS or other healthcare organisation
  • A university or other educational establishment
  • A charity or non-profit organisation
  • Large/medium retail company
  • Large/medium creative industry

Below is a copy of my progress report which outlines the research project.

Introduction and Background

The intention of this investigation is to find how best ICT can enhance human interaction within organisations to create the ‘positive network effect’ observed by Tapscott & Williams (2006) or the ‘wisdom of crowds’ phenomena described by the economist James Surowiecki (2004). As the internet has progressed, becoming more two-way and interactive, the term ‘Web 2.0’ has emerged to describe it’s many characteristics. This assignment will be concerned with how value can be added by researching this area of possible further development and take-up.

From this research, results and analysis it will refer back to the technologies and systems involved and asses each for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Results will be interpreted to become recommendations to add value to existing research into organisational use of Web 2.0 in the UK. The main beneficiaries would be those seeking to gain an insight into emerging opportunities and threats in this field for commercial or academic purposes.

Review of Progress

The title for the main report has changed many times. One of the main obstacles that were faced was choosing a specific area to investigate and then how to quantify it. How the report will add value to the body of research was also another question. There have been approximately four meetings with Ian Stewart and many other attempts to meet which have not happened for various reasons. Many email exchanges have also taken place in discussion of the project which have been very helpful. The majority of progress so far has been reading and note taking in the project diary (see ‘Literature Review’ Appendix 1 - Gantt Chart 1), filling over one third of the diary’s pages. Ideas have gone in various directions and observations made by doing this has helped to create a focus on where value can be added by further research and study.

Gantt Chart 1 (see Appendix 1) shows defining the project was a long process. After receiving feedback from my meetings and emails with the project supervisor, it became clear that the current working title: ‘Are the traditional top-down style hierarchical government and business models challenged by self organising and open source models emerging from ICT?’, was too vague and immeasurable. How can you quantify being challenged?

It then changed to the title: ‘Are self organising and open source models emerging from ICT a viable competitor to the traditional top-down style hierarchical government and business models?’, which at first seemed more quantifiable. However the Autumn Progress Review gave directional advice that showed weaknesses in my current approach. How do I define “self organising” and what specific question was being asked?

What I came to realise was that I needed to focus on either a particular question with pre-defined research terms and extract information in a meaningful way which can add value to existing research. The term Web 2.0 characterises many of the effects of the self organising, bottom-up open platform which has the potential to exploit the Wisdom of Crowds phenomena.

Literature Review Summary

The following will present research which is seen to be relevant in supporting the main report. Reading Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds (2004) It was realised that to focus the report I could concentrate my research on the phenomena itself and then find systems in ICT and to see if it is being successfully exploited. To me, the obviousness of potential of connecting the two is worth investigating.

Surowiecki (2004) said ‘If you put together a big enough group and diverse enough group and ask them to make a decision effecting matters of general interest, that groups decisions will over time, be intellectually superior to the isolated individual, no matter how smart or well informed they are”. Although he points out there are many examples of bad group decisions like mob behaviour which highlights what happens when diversity and independence are missing. He says that this is important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest not consensus or compromise.

Investigation then led to an area which is arguably already using this phenomena; Web 2.0. The Chartered Institute of Personnel (CIPD 2009) report states that collaboration is essential to knowledge creation and innovation and one of the promises of Web 2.0 is to substantially reduce the cost of this collaboration and that the so-called economic networking effects rely on better quality decision making and knowledge generation. “The ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ thesis which underpins applications such as Wikipedia states that collective intelligence by groups often results in better decision making than could be made by any individual” (CIPD 2008).

The CIPD in their practice research report, Web 2.0 and Human Resource Management (2009) identified six characteristics of Web 2.0 which are relevant to Human Resource Management but are a good deconstruction of this technology to apply to organisations in general.

  • Participation and collaboration – (Tapscott & Williams 2006) argue collaboration is vital to modern economies and there is an overall positive network effect can be to reduce cost.
  • Openness – Open source material as apposed to enterprise 2.0 which is behind company firewalls.
  • User control – Ability to present a yourself how you choose or even be anonymous
  • Decentralised and democratisation – While decentralisation is necessary for wider participation, openness, participation and positive network effects, it is also the most worrying because of the potential to damage a brand.
  • Standards – Common interfaces like XML, Java and media streaming
  • Modularity – built bottom up from user feedback and the customisation potential

The CIPD report’s suggests the unfulfilled potential for Web 2.0 in the UK as numbers of the younger and older networked workers increase. The UK lack behind in many areas according to the combined research from Foster Research (2007) and the Global Information Technology Report (2007-2008) which is cited in the CIPD report. Respondents were asked whether they used various Web 2.0 services at least once a month. Just 3% in the UK said they write a blog compared to 21% in the USA, 51% in Japan and 31% in South Korea. 10% in the UK read a blog, with 25% in USA. This significant and to some extent surprising disparity of UK respondents’ Web 2.0 uptake is generally consistent, including France and Germany in areas such as read/write consumer reviews, participate in discussions and use RSS. Except visiting social networking sites, with the UK 21%, France just 3%, Germany 10%, Japan 20% and USA 25%.

The CIPD report uses concise case studies to extract key benefits and challenges of companies which use Web 2.0. Below is an example of one of them:

Organisation: Pfizer

Background: Worlds largest research based biomedical and pharmaceutical company in the world, H.Q. in New York 4,000 staff globally based including the UK. They used an open source Wiki technology repository to help work more effectively.

Benefits:

  • Supports creation and nurturing an innovative culture
  • Overcomes tendencies towards ‘silo participation’ and bureaucratic approval process
  • Appeals to younger generation or ‘Generation Y’ and therefore helps talent acquisition and integration

Challenges:

  • Dealing with the change ramifications of promoting access to the new ‘bottom-up’ collaboration tools such as Pfizerpedia. The enthusiasm of early adopters alone was not enough to achieve tipping point of organisational uptake. A guide using cultural change programmes may have been helpful

Tapscott & Williams book titled Wikinomics (2008) in chapter 7, ‘The Wiki Workplace’ states “companies able to adapt to the new demands of next generation consumers and workers now will gain a tremendous source of competitive advantage and innovation”. Some refer to them as ‘generation Y’, reaching out to them can offer increased recruitment and sales potential which is reiterated by the CIPD (2009) report.

The research conducted so far has lead to the conclusion that value can be added to this field by examining how UK organisations can best deploy the use of Web 2.0, especially considering the figures from the Foster Research (2007) and the Global Information Technology Report (2007-2008) if still accurate in this fast-paced environment.

Planning for the Report

Using a similar framework of outputs as the CIPD report, this report will try to gain further research by conducting approximately ten brief case studies through questionnaires, research and interviews. The studies will be conducted on large and medium sized businesses, councils, charities or other organisation and will be seeking to find the following;

  • Do they utilise internal web 2.0 and/or enterprise 2.0
  • Do they use online chat/discussion boards, rating/review systems, blogs, media streaming, or podcasts for employees, customers or other stakeholders?
  • What benefits, if any, have come from them?
  • Have they had any negative experiences with these features, if so what?
  • Do they use Wikis which are user regulated for organisational knowledge distribution?
  • Do they use or allow any other form of social networking and if so how?
  • An overall rating their perceived effectiveness for each.

The research will also include a section for comments, if any, that the participant wishes to make. This will be a management and workforce opinion and it is hope to be able to conduct these interviews by telephone and email and possibly through web applications, blogs and social media, which would be quite appropriate but may influence the outcome of the participants’ response in favour Web 2.0 as that is how they are participating in the research.

It is hoped to do this by calling head offices, emailing appropriate people in an organisation and if any questions are unable to be answered they can be sourced from other places like looking at websites and academic company research. This way an external view of the company can also be gathered. Each piece of information on a certain company can be aggregated to form a bigger picture of one single organisation using triangulation of results.

With this information it is hoped to produce around ten brief case studies like that undertaken by the CIPD. The scope of the project allows for an analysis to be conducted with an adequate amount of information from case studies and literature review.

An evaluation of the report will be necessary to compare with similar studies and asses the reliability of sources and the research methods used and see where value has been added. Possible improvements and recommendations for further work will be included as part of the main report.

Bibliography & References

Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. (2009). Web 2.0 And Human Resource Management: 'Groundswell' or hype? London: CIPD.

Shuen, A. (2008). Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide. Cambridge: O'Reilly Media.

Surowiecki, J. (2004). The Wisdom of Crowds . London: Little, Brown.

Williams, T. &. (2006). Wikinomics - How mass Collaboration Changes Everything. London: Atlantic Books.


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