This is a guest post by Martin Böhringer (Chemnitz University of Technology).
My first publication on enterprise microblogging dates back to 2008 and was one of the first scientific works in this field. Back then we did not know much about the background of such systems. Why do people use them? Why should they be useful in the enterprise context? How and what do people “tweet” in organisational usage? Today, less than two years later, there is a fast rising body of scientific knowledge about Twitter-like information systems which can offer some answers to these questions. In this article, I am going to sum up these insights.
The initial use case
When talking to companies, some people tell me that they do not see any use case for microblogging in their organisation. That is a very strange statement. The use case for microblogging is information. It is about information publishing, information allocation, information crowdsourcing and information reuse, to name just a few. Twitter itself is a huge exchange machine between millions of information hubs. The idea behind this exchange machine is that only the user themselves can know what kind of information they need. And only the user can adjust these information needs timely to new contexts and requirements. If we could know who in the enterprise needs what information at what time and from whom, then of course we could build a suitable information system which might fit better than microblogging. However, we do not.
As both a researcher and a consultant, I have been involved in a number of microblogging projects using enterprise microblogging tools like Communote, StatusNet, Yammer and self-developed applications. The company size of these cases ranges from 5 to 200 employees; two other projects with larger organisations are currently in their early steps. The first insight is that in all these cases, microblogging has been successful in some way. The second insight is that in every case the reason for the success and the definition of success has been different. It depends on factors like company culture, the form of organisation, type of work (e.g. project work) and how the technology is adopted. In two of my cases, microblogging has nearly completely replaced internal email communication. People consider it to be their central information hub and rely on microblogging’s possibilities to create transparency and awareness, whilst enabling flexible structuring and filtering of information. In other cases, microblogging is used in conjunction with email – however, in one case most of the employees refuse to use microblogging actively and will read passively only what three microblogging-using colleagues write.
The point is that this is also a valid and perhaps good outcome of a microblogging project. You cannot force users to adopt microblogging in a certain way. Therefore, introducing microblogging to an organisation has to be seen as an infrastructure project like installing phones and email. As with wikis or internal social networks, the technology is shaped by the users and their contexts. Because of their different culture, employees of a young marketing agency will use an internal Twitter service very differently to an engineering department using microblogging as an information hub for their R&D projects. It can be seen as the big advantage of microblogging that this is possible.
Just the beginning: the extended use case
In his book Mirror Worlds David Gelernter wrote in 1992: “At the same time we develop vast complex software worlds, the simple machines of information structure are also just being invented. The wheel, the ramp, the wedge, the screw, the lever. [...] It makes no sense to reinvent the bolt and the geartrain every time you design a mechanical device. Builders of information machinery too would prefer to start with the universal, basic stuff in hand. But what are the simple information machines?”. Today we can give an answer to this question: such simple information machines, which can complement complex information systems (e.g. ERP), is microblogging with its publish/subscribe mechanism and flexible hashtag support.
Several scientific case studies on enterprise microblogging show that organisational usage of Twitter-like tools is different from its public examples. People concentrate on work, coffee-tweets are seldom. Trust is very important as are rights management, ease of use and management support. People use more formal language to what they would use on Twitter and focus on “their” topics. Therefore, enterprise microblogging should include the information sources people need for their work. Next to other users, this especially applies to information sources which have been automated: non-human sources like financial information systems (e.g. @SAP_Purchasing: “@boehr Your purchase requisition has been approved.”), machines (e.g. @Machine_errors: “RT @M134223 Temperature is too high #error.”) and whole processes (e.g. @Proposal_P9932: “The proposal has been sent to the customer.”). We have introduced the term of “ubiquitous microblogging” for this approach. Salesforce does a good job in including such ideas in its product Chatter.
Is microblogging here to stay?
Well, I do not have a final answer for that. What we can say for sure is that principles introduced by microblogging will move into existing information systems. Following/unfollowing, hashtags and status updates will be an important part of our expectations towards new social software, whether the future will call it microblogging, activity streams, feeds or something else.
About
Martin Böhringer is a PhD student at Chemnitz University of Technology (Germany). His primary research interests centre on the successful utilisation of social software, especially microblogging applications in organisational contexts. Previously he was avvisiting research fellow at Norwich Business School (UK). Martin works as an independent IT consultant and has professional experiences with many IT companies including IBM and Siemens. He blogs at http://thingthatthinks.com/.
