Network Communities: Supporting distributed field organizations

Position paper for the Computer Supported Collaborative Work conference, CSCW 98, November, 1998.

Network Communities is a new project starting in Sun Laboratories at Sun Microsystems, Inc.  Our goal is to develop new technologies to support distributed work groups so that they can conveniently find the right expertise at the right time.  Our experience in studying distributed work groups has indicated that accomplishing their work often relies on personal networking with their colleagues.  For example, among the system support engineers who provide technical support to our customers, when a customer has a technical problem, the engineers sometimes need to network with their colleagues around the world to find out who has the right expertise to resolve their problem.  This can be a hit or miss process, and the engineers are looking for ways of helping them be more efficient and effective in finding the right expertise at the right time.

We've been intrigued with the popularity of virtual community technologies in on-line socializing, and particularly the ways they have engaged people to invest time and effort into building their community on-line.  Studies of virtual communities suggest that they encourage people to engage in social networking [Wellman et al., 1996].  It's interesting to note that they achieve such engagement using relatively simple technology (typically text chat rooms), and usually without tangible rewards outside of the social status within the virtual community.

We would like to apply virtual community technologies to help support the social networking that our distributed work groups need to do to accomplish their work. We plan to apply ethnographic methods to study how a particular distributed work group accomplishes their work, and use that information to guide the design of a prototype system to support their work [Simonsen & Kensing, 1997].  We will then deploy that system into the work group and observe how they use it over time.  Although we have not designed our system yet, we imagine the following scenario of use.

Scenario: Supporting service engineers distributed around the world

Kai-fu responds to the request and joins a text chat with Jade.  Kai-fu is actually handling a customer on the phone, but he can intersperse chatting with Jade over the computer while talking with his customer.  Jade describes the problem to Kai-fu, copying some information that she has already recorded in her service request log, and adding new information that she asks from the customer, who she has kept on the phone.  Kai-fu is able to provide a key piece of information that allows Jade to continue on her own to resolve the customer's problem.  Jade thanks Kai-fu through the text chat window as he continues to resolve his other call while Jade follows through with the customer to resolve the problem. After Jade has finished the call with the customer, she documents her solution to the problem, including excerpts copied from the text chat with Kai-fu.  Her solution becomes part of the appropriate web page (accompanied with contact information for her) so that others might be able to solve similar problems by consulting the web page or contacting her for more information.

The above scenario shows the combination of a naturally growing knowledge base with contact pointers that make it easy to find people who can help quickly resolve problems not found in the knowledge base.  It relies on the community investment of keeping the knowledge base up to date, plus makes it easy to contact people for expertise not found in the existing knowledge.  The scenario also shows how the virtual community technology must smoothly interact with a variety of other technologies currently in use: web pages, phone, e-mail, existing workflow tools.  Text chat is a convenient communication mode because it is easily available throughout the enterprise, can occur in parallel with a phone conversation (which is the primary contact medium with the customer), and can leave a documented record of how the problem was resolved, which can be published on a web page or copied into the workflow tool for tracking service requests.

Research Questions

We plan to do an observational study of the technical support group for about four months, then take about six months to develop some prototype technology to support their needs, and then deploy that technology within the group and study how they use it for a few more months.  Some of the research questions we will be trying to answer include:

• How can we demonstrate the productivity benefits of work-related network   communities?  We will need to understand how to convince both   management and end users of the value of investing effort into such   communities.
• What are the common components of the technology infrastructure   and community building procedures needed to support network   communities?  We expect that there is a collection of technologies   that can be generally applied to distributed work groups so that they   can develop their own community.
• What guidelines can be developed to help users build and sustain a productive,   successful network community?  We expect that we can construct   guidelines that will enable users to take the technology   infrastructure and build communities that are customized to their   particular use.

Reference

Wellman, Barry, Janet Salaff, Dimitrina Dimitrova, Laura Garton, Milena Gulia, and Caroline Haythornthwaite, "Computer Networks as Social Networks: Collaborative Work, Telework, and Virtual Community", Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 22, 1996, pp. 211-238.