Social bookmarking in the enterprise

Abstract

In this practitioner-oriented overview of a pilot project at a medium-sized software company, we outline the early phases of an effort to implement a Social Bookmarking System (SBS) within an enterprise. In particular, we discuss some of the unexpected challenges encountered with regards to potential user adoption, and the design strategy we used to address those challenges. 1. Introduction: Findability in the enterprise intranet has become an increasing critical issue with the growth in size and complexity of corporate information environments. To date, much of the solution space has focused on approaches such as the construction of rich, domain specific taxonomies and the development of sophisticated full-text search algorithms [1]. These methods can be extremely expensive and require careful ongoing maintenance to succeed. While they have proved valuable, some organizations, are beginning to seek out new innovations [2]. Social Bookmarking Systems (SBS) are a class of collaborative applications that allow users to save, access, share and describe shortcuts to web resources. Initially conceived as personal information management tools, they were designed to function as centralized storage repositories to simplify the collection of bookmarks for users who browse the Internet with more than one machine in different locations. Later, systems such as the now archetypical del.icio.us [3] added two key features: 1) description of bookmarks with arbitrary free keywords (â taggingâ ), and 2) sharing of bookmarks and tags across users. We decided to undertake a small pilot project within our own enterprise to determine whether an SBS might aid in refindability, term extraction, and identification of communities of practice. Recent technology experiments such as IBMâ s Dogear [4] have suggested some promise for del.icio.us-style systems inside the corporate firewall. 2. Assessing User Readiness: One of the attractive features of social software is that they tend to be inexpensive to implement from a technical standpoint. However, because their success relies entirely on user participation, the organizational cost can be quite high. Therefore, instead of moving directly into implementation, we first conducted a user survey and series of interviews to both validate the deficiency in existing information retrieval mechanisms and gauge the receptivity to bookmarking as a possible solution. Rather than definitive data about user attitudes towards tagging, we found it difficult to elicit constructive feedback because most users â even those familiar with existing systems such as del.icio.us â did not fundamentally understand core social bookmarking concepts. 3. Communicating Concepts to Users: Based on our initial findings, we modified our project plan to focus efforts on user education. We employed a non-traditional design approach in which we identified the central features of an SBS, mapped those features to user activities, and then translated the activity scenarios into graphical comics. In architecting complex systems, comics can more effectively communicate concepts by abstracting away technical details such as the user interface. [5] 4. Future Work and Implications: This education strategy is incorporated into the roadmap for the future phases of the project that also includes milestones related to technical extensibility, data collection, and internal marketing to drive usage. We believe that the most critical aspect of implementing social classification within an enterprise context may be preparing users to both understand and embrace tagging as a conceptual framework.