- Oct 2022
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www.zylstra.org www.zylstra.org
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The information manager was surprised by this, saying something like “and I have these BI specialists who never came up with this kind of use for the data”.
Internal re-use along the lines of [[Data wat de overheid doet 20141013110101]] means questions being asked of the data, that BI teams don't think of. (perhaps because of the common disconnect between bi-teams and operational/policy teams?) This is a repeat pattern of what can be observed externally with open data as well. (Vgl CBS open data community in the 2010s)
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companies are their own objects of sociality as well as their own user group
companies are their own objects of sociality (the work, processes, habits etc.) companies are their own self-formed user group. I am placing companies here on the spectrum of communities of interest/learning/practice. #2007/10/26
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They were adding social structures and context to the data. Basically adding social software design principles to a large volume of data.
After letting professionals in a company have access to their internal BI data, they made it re-usable for themselves by -adding social structures (iirc indicating past and present people, depts etc., curating it for specific colleagues, forming subgroups around parts of the data) -adding context (iirc linking it to ongoing work, and external developments, adding info on data origin) Thus they started socially filtering the data, with the employee network as social network [[Social netwerk als filter 20060930194648]].
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they had given a number of their professionals access to their business intelligence data. Because they were gathering so much data nobody really looked at for lack of good questions to ask of the dataset. The professionals put the data to good use, because they could formulate the right questions.
Most data in a company is collected for a single purpose (indicators, reporting, marketing). Companies usually don't look at how that data about themselves might be re-used by themselves. Vgl [[Data wat de overheid doet 20141013110101]] where I described this same effect for the public sector (based on work for the Court of Audit, not tying it back to this here. n:: re-use company internal data
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Companies are excellent environments for social filtering. Because they sit on large volumes of data and information, going largely unused. Because organisations are a group of people with shared goals and tasks.
This never happened in this way. Another example of how #socsoft became marketing almost exlusively. With the exeception perhaps of async tools like Slack (2013) or Yammer (2008, still exists as part of MS), although filtering is not their point, their users may use it that way. The whole #socsoft for org internal k-work never got much traction. Still a lost opportunity imo. Tools probably need to better fit existing culture/communication styles in org and be internal, but being created as separate place external with its own assumptions.
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Social software works well given these conditions because these tools are the internet’s response to the enormous volume of information the internet helped create. Social software is the answer to the internet by the internet. The quantitative change in information availability (going from scarcity to abundance) leads to qualitative changes in our information strategies. Social filtering is one of those changed information strategies. Social software caters to social filtering.
I wrote this in 2007, just as FB and Twitter took off, so was thinking not of them but other social tools (social software rather than media). One way #socmed turned toxic is because they started filtering for us?
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