Jul
27
Written by:
Mikkel Lund
7/27/2011 6:41 AM
For some time I’ve been part of a development team where we’re trying to
put more facebook into your case management system. I want to share some of our thoughts and try to explain some of the issues that we face.
Activity stream is a phrase that relates to social media or microblogging. As an emerging case management supplier (and ordinary users of social media) we are especially curious about the intersection between case management and status updates. This is a topic that Martin Böhringer from Chemnitz University has done lots of research into.
Here are two rough problems that we’re dealing with:
- How to get posts and comments as close to the well-defined business objects as possible
- How to conceptualize streams in an intuitive manner
The first problem is about combining status updates with case management. When we provide customers with our solution it’s pretty self-evident that customers are mostly interested in the case page. Clients see the casepage and evaluate it for its ability to serve as a container for documents, workflow and critical metadata. How long does it take to save a mail or a document to a case? Where do I see the next step for this workflow? This is all configured to the world of the clients’ business and organisation.
In our world the case is king. The case consists of domain-specific metadata. For a long time social context has existed on the outside and only rarely included in the case. An appropriate metaphor for a case management system is a shelves system or file cabinet in an office. The shelve system exists approx. two meters from the desk where the work is actually done… And not actually a part of all the important stuff that is relevant on a knowledge workers desk. This is not necessarily all bad, because then the user would only put the important stuff on the shelves. But still. The future is more about social than case.
So to get more social context to the case we “borrowed” some basic functionality from social networks on the internet. We got inspired by activity streams and made it possible to post a status update on a case. Others could comment on a case update. If you got mentioned in an update or a comment you get “mention”-noticed. All your notices are available from the front page, where you read new “mentions”. We refer to the posts and comments as activity streams.
When this was implemented it was considered a small step in a more social direction. Looking back it was changed a lot about how we internally interact with our cases. Through a small set of semi-structured interviews I’ve conducted within the organization, it’s clear that the implications are deeper than we thought.
Overall the effects have been positive. It has become much more interesting to stumble upon cases and learn from it through peoples’ questions and comments. Courtesy of the mention-system we now send fewer emails – especially fewer of the kind with only URLs to cases in our system.
Among the more tricky effects is the confusion about when to create a formal object (eg. creating a new task in the system) vs. just using the stream. Situations arise where a conversation in the stream will involve performing some research. But since the stream is very open-ended, it is a tricky to know exactly how to react to these i-need-your-help-and-not-just-smalltalk-messages. This relates to a question on another level: how do you make people do something they don’t necessarily want to do? To this it is noticeable that a task-object holds more authority than a one-and-a-half-lined status update (that possibly has typos or contains a smiley).
The design of our activity streams still needs some work, but the major challenge for most clients is about conceptually understanding the streams. It is very rarely a part of the clients’ requirements and for people used to mailing each other it can be hard to understand. Even if the clients understand the mention system they can be uncomfortable that postings can be read by others – even co-workers (email is somehow considered “safer” because only the sender and recipient reads it). And if clients intend to use the system for human resource management, the mere idea of encouraging knowledge sharing can be counterintuitive. Protection of sensitive information about co-workers is more important than populating a case page with relevant QA’s and comments.
Breaking down clients’ conceptual barriers to case based status updating is tricky, when it seems the clients simply want to stay in their outlook-world and throw emails and documents in the file cabinet. A very persuasive argument in this relation seems to be a leaner inbox. Usually clients are very busy people who receive lots of emails daily. If you make it clear that clients can shave off a big portion of the daily mails from your co-workers, while heightening the broad data quality of cases in your case management system they become interested.
Future development involves improved usability. Secondary we are experimenting with system generated posts that users can comment on. As of now our stream isn’t really a proper activity stream, because it only consists of user generated posts, i.e. status updates. We want to include the most critical elements from the log to give the stream a feel of history or log, where users’ comments are interwoven with the actual progression (phase shift, task completion, document upload, etc.). However you easily get to spam the user with irrelevant info. But I don’t believe that we are the only development crew with this challenge.
Please comment or ask any kind of question. We are very interested in hearing about enterprises and microblogging. Cheers.
5 comment(s) so far...
Re: Design thoughts on activity streams
Thanks for this great article and for sharing your experiences with activity streams. In our research we also heard stories of digital immigrants having problems with this open style of communications. But I wouldn't take this problem to serious. Just look at facebook's user numbers and it is clear that there are so many organisations out there where a majority of users already is familiar with the culture of open sharing. With our startup hojoki.com we currently focus on such customers with supporting cloud tools like Google Docs, Delicious and Dropbox. It would be interesting to learn about what source systems you plan to connect to your activity stream!
By Martin Böhringer on
7/27/2011 11:48 AM
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Re: Design thoughts on activity streams
We are considering integration to Doodle. Doodle is the most complementary addon to our solution at the time. Effective meeting planning is critical, period.
Docs or delicious are less so, because we cover this need in sharepoint.
However Dropbox or evernote could be interesting. They offer synchronization for a ton of mobile solutions. (evernote has a native application for almost all platforms? it's crazy). We could utilize that syncronizity so users could synchronize content with their company's ECM via dropbox or evernote. That would be something.
We have a mobile app for our solution but it's oriented towards the king: the case objects. And the less toward file management part.
By Mikkel Lund on
7/28/2011 1:55 AM
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Re: Design thoughts on activity streams
I like the expression the case is king.
In traditional case management systems people used a case long to inform themselves and other case workers about major events and status on the case. Basically, this is the same as the activity stream, where the activity stream add a picture of the author and date written in a new format, e.g. "one week ago" rather than "22-7-2011", as well as the ability to comment and mentions.
However, these small changes make a considerable difference. The ability to see a picture of your colleague makes the working experience more personal and relevant, and presenting dates in the new format makes it easier for the reader to deduct the relevance, e.g. how old, the information is. Finally the ability to commend and mentions slowly moves interactions from emails into the activity stream so important discussions is also captured here.
Capturing the inter-actions among people is central. Knowledge is not created by brainy people and distributed among the case workers. Rather, case workers are constantly challenged with new type of work and questions, and inter-actions are used for establishing new knowledge in the companies. Capturing this knowledge in the activity stream makes it easier for other case workers to follow discussions and for process owners to understand the complexity of the underlying work.
The concept "social" in business software is not the same as seen in e.g. Facebook. People are certainly acting social in companies, but it is expressed in different ways. Helping colleagues and guiding them to important information, raising questions etc is a social aspect of business cultures and can be supported by the activity stream by capturing not only the facts but also the more loose inter-actions, discussions, among business users.
Dealing with corporate activity management you face new security challenges as the openness of Facebook does not work. Many aspects of businesses are hidden and should be. When presenting activity streams people are often scared as they expect the openness from Facebook to be found in a business tool. Presenting and filtering content based on the security rules within the case management system is critical. Once people understand this their willingness to adopt it increases.
Martin raises the issue of integration with various services such as Google Docs and Dropbox. Mikkel has answered these questions. We see a more interesting integration effort namely integrating business processes across corporate boundaries. Obviously this involves integrating activity streams across corporate firewalls, and we are currently investigating this with various customers.
Sharing knowledge across corporate firewalls in the same manner while preserving critical security rules found in the case management system is obviously not easy.
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Morten Marquard is co-founder of Exformatics and responsible for strategy and innovation.
By Morten Marquard on
7/29/2011 4:30 AM
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Re: Design thoughts on activity streams
I like the expression the case is king.
In traditional case management systems people used a case long to inform themselves and other case workers about major events and status on the case. Basically, this is the same as the activity stream, where the activity stream add a picture of the author and date written in a new format, e.g. "one week ago" rather than "22-7-2011", as well as the ability to comment and mentions.
However, these small changes make a considerable difference. The ability to see a picture of your colleague makes the working experience more personal and relevant, and presenting dates in the new format makes it easier for the reader to deduct the relevance, e.g. how old, the information is. Finally the ability to commend and mentions slowly moves interactions from emails into the activity stream so important discussions is also captured here.
Capturing the inter-actions among people is central. Knowledge is not created by brainy people and distributed among the case workers. Rather, case workers are constantly challenged with new type of work and questions, and inter-actions are used for establishing new knowledge in the companies. Capturing this knowledge in the activity stream makes it easier for other case workers to follow discussions and for process owners to understand the complexity of the underlying work.
The concept "social" in business software is not the same as seen in e.g. Facebook. People are certainly acting social in companies, but it is expressed in different ways. Helping colleagues and guiding them to important information, raising questions etc is a social aspect of business cultures and can be supported by the activity stream by capturing not only the facts but also the more loose inter-actions, discussions, among business users.
Dealing with corporate activity management you face new security challenges as the openness of Facebook does not work. Many aspects of businesses are hidden and should be. When presenting activity streams people are often scared as they expect the openness from Facebook to be found in a business tool. Presenting and filtering content based on the security rules within the case management system is critical. Once people understand this their willingness to adopt it increases.
Martin raises the issue of integration with various services such as Google Docs and Dropbox. Mikkel has answered these questions. We see a more interesting integration effort namely integrating business processes across corporate boundaries. Obviously this involves integrating activity streams across corporate firewalls, and we are currently investigating this with various customers.
Sharing knowledge across corporate firewalls in the same manner while preserving critical security rules found in the case management system is obviously not easy.
---
Morten Marquard is co-founder of Exformatics and responsible for strategy and innovation.
By Morten Marquard on
7/29/2011 2:37 PM
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Re: Design thoughts on activity streams
Hi, great article - and nice to hear from a case management vendor that is taking the social information structure principles serious.
In my world The User is King! :-) And I think this is why activity streams, notifications, and mentions might be a splended idea. Since a case is not merely a folder on a shelf, but is the product of actual units of work - almost always in collaboration with others.
Lately I've been wondering if it would make sense to have genuine Facebook-like status updates which are not attached to a case, or which are attached to other domain object (e.g. documents, memos, users, parties? ...), or which are attached to actions (e.g. case updates, deletions, document creations, ...).
Do you have a viewpoint on this? Also, have you considered stuff like Like's or similar?
I'd love to year much more about your progress and experience - I hope you'll keep blogging about it :-)
Br. Morten
By Morten Maate on
3/15/2012 9:49 AM
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