Manfred Langen

Intelligent message distribution in corporate expert communities

The basic challenge of information management is to provide useful information to the right people in a given situation, such as for problem solving. In a company, semantic technologies in combination with enterprise social media applications can be applied for the identification of experts in a required field of expertise. Our approach uses the Web 3L model, a 3-layer structure of networks which includes relations from social and semantic networks. It is shown how this model can be used to target the right crowd for corporate problem solving. The distribution of urgent requests in an internal knowledge networking tool is described as a real world example that is used in a productive environment.

Responsible corporate problem solving — A Siemens case study with TechnoWeb 2.0

A high maturity in corporate problem solving is a competitive advantage. Companies seek to use the wisdom of the crowd they have internally. One approach is to enable the employees to publish a so-called Urgent Request. For a quick and high-quality response it is helpful to distribute such an Urgent Request either to a high number of employees (broadcasting) or to target the message to those employees which have the highest probability to answer (target messaging). The first approach usually causes crowd fatigue. Therefore we focus on the target messaging approach and demonstrate how this more responsible usage of notifications can reduce the number of notifications by an order of magnitude with almost no loss of the response rate. This paper presents the real-life data of the semantic target messaging algorithm of TechnoWeb, a Siemens-internal social media platform for corporate problem solving.

Disruptive innovation with social computing: What comes next?

The first generation of Web 2.0 applications appeared in the Internet. A new style of interaction was born where everybody can easily publish own content or is able to comment on content of other authors. It took some time until the enterprise IT world adopted these interaction principles and the according technologies for the internal collaboration of employees. Such the new market of enterprise social software arose. This market now begins to reach a mature level. This paper describes a systematic approach derived from disruptive innovation theory to tackle the hard question “Whats next?”. What is the next market which is created or basically changed by the influence of social software and offers new opportunities for innovation.

Collaborative trend scouting and roadmapping

Trend scouting and roadmapping is no longer the task of a small team of specialists. As participation of the crowd can be fostered by applying Web 2.0 technologies the innovation process has become more collaborative. User generated content together with proper navigation and visualization features enables such a process. In this paper two different but similar types of radars are introduced. The future radar gives an overview on socio-economical long-term trends while the innovation radar includes roadmaps of technological developments and business ideas. It is shown how the concept of a participative innovation process can be realized with a collaboration platform with social media features.

Who adapts what in HCI

The acceptance of a system as a whole strongly depends on the quality and appropriateness of its user interface in a certain working environment. Especially in the medical environment particular conditions - such as heavy workload on physicians and nurses, the patients health as the overall objective and lack of time for training - have to be taken into account; these conditions demand for sophisticated adaptation strategies.