Pictures of the Future    Spring 2004

Companies are like sponges. They soak up the knowledge in their employees’ minds. Communities—virtual teams on the Internet—can help share this treasury of information if employees are effectively motivated.

The story that flickered across German TV screens on October 18, 2003, appeared to be the work of a single writer. But the mystery was actually the product of six amateur authors—including a doctor, an educator and an office worker—who put together their script on the Internet. The eScript project by German television station ZDF began as an experiment in 1999. Today, it delivers three Wilsberg mysteries a year. "The scripts are just as good as those written by professionals," says Martin R. Neumann, a television-movie editor at the broadcaster’s headquarters in Mainz and the coordinator of the virtual script-writing community. For their efforts, the writers involved in the project have received the Grimme Online Award.

Knowledge-based communities are really nothing new. From the caves of the Stone Age to today’s meeting rooms and cafeterias, people have always gotten together at the same time and place to create knowledge and share it. But a new twist has evolved. Communities also can form in Internet forums or chat rooms. These communities transcend departmental, company and national borders and are entirely independent of time and place. This is a tremendous opportunity for companies to improve their performance—assuming they know how to mine this scattered wealth of knowledge. "Communities contain more knowledge than the sum of what all of the participants know. They store information and distribute it like a network," says Dr. Josef Hofer-Alfeis, who coordinates knowledge management for the company at Siemens Corporate Information and Operations (CIO). More than 1,250 communities devoted to a variety of subjects have already been created on Siemens’ intranet, Hofer-Alfeis says. The Knowledge Management community of practice that he oversees is among the biggest, with about 300 members. One of the newest is the Innovation Manager community, with 100 members.

Equitable communication. "A real community should be one of the five most important things in the members’ lives," stresses Cynthia Typaldos, a corporate consultant for community marketing in Saratoga, California, and the founder of numerous Web communities. But when is an online community important for a member? Karsten Ehms of the Research Center for Knowledge Management at Siemens Corporate Technology (CT) in Munich conducted interviews and sent out questionnaires to find out why Siemens employees use virtual marketplaces to exchange information. The main reason was "learning and gaining new knowledge," followed by explanations that include sharing similar experiences and comparing perspectives on society—the very same motives that you can find offline. But there are differences. Udo Konradt is a professor who studies work, organization and market psychology at the University of Kiel. In an empirical study of several companies, he determined that virtual communication was conducted in a faster, more concise and more equitable manner. But a pure online community is only a dream, he says. "There is no substitute for occasional face-to-face meetings, because gestures and facial expressions play a very important role in our ability to size up people, particularly when conflicts have to be resolved," he concludes.

Karsten Ehms also concluded that the freedom to be creative and to make independent decisions was an important motivation. As a result, Ehms disagreed with many managers who would like to exert more control over the communities or harness them for concrete projects. "That would destroy motivation." A community is not a hierarchically controlled organizational unit, he says. But, on the other hand, a community doesn’t simply run on its own. In this regard, Ehms’ department has come up with a few rules.

No place for windbags. Langen’s dealings with Siemens’ communities have been very positive. Employees are required to attend meetings, but members of virtual communities go only when they will get something useful from the gatherings, he says. "Windbags don’t stand a chance," he adds. Some critics maintain that knowledge management will strip away the authority of experts. But Langen, an electronics engineer at Siemens, rejects such notions. The reluctance to share information is a reaction to bad experiences and flawed structures in a company, he says. The fruitful results of Siemens’ knowledge-exchange effort are reflected by the company’s recent success in the "Most Admired Knowledge Enterprise Award" competition, In 2003, Siemens was ranked No. 1 in Europe and seventh worldwide in the knowledge-management survey of managers.

In the future, Web logs will play an important role at Siemens, according to Ehms. These logs, originally created as online diaries, are being used in companies because they offer easy documentation of work processes and can be accessed by community members. Web logs differ from normal online forums in two ways. First, a Web log usually belongs to one owner who maintains it, and secondly, the entries are chronologically organized, like a ship’s log—thus the name Web log. In the process, subjects can be summarized and structured with links.

At the Center for New Media at the Krems Danube University in Austria, all employees have their own Web logs, which serve as a file system. "The knowledge and experiences of each employee are accessible by all," says Thomas N. Burg, the media scientist who heads the center. Burg’s team is developing an extranet based on Web logs for an Austrian government agency. The extranet organizes the flow of information between companies and the agency. Next, Burg wants to make it easier to set up social networks by using Web logs.

Hofer-Alfeis is also working on ways to automatically establish knowledge networks. He believes that if all Siemens employees had knowledge profiles that were semi-automatically generated from documents and e-mails, people with similar interests could be brought together in new or pre-existing communities—something like flirting on the Internet. "But the activities of a community have to grow out of the business strategy," Hofer-Alfeis adds.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering in Stuttgart is going a step further. Using Vitero software that the institute developed itself, entire meetings are conducted on monitors. Scattered in various locations, participants meet in a virtual room, sit down with a click of a mouse and see the other members as small images sitting around a table. While a presentation appears on the table, team members can type questions in small balloons and make gestures. "After a short time, the participants feel they are right in the thick of things," says Dr. Fabian Kempf from the institute. Unlike regular meetings, where the biggest challenge is often the fight against passivity and drowsiness, communication at online meetings is more intense and lively, he says. Adds Kempf: "During a Vitero meeting attended by six persons, up to 15 gestures are used each minute."
                                                                                                                Bernd Müller

When Online and Offline Fuse

Interview with Christoph Müller

Christoph Müller, 40, is a sociologist in Zurich. At the University of Bern, he worked on a research project on online community building, and is now addressing this topic in his dissertation

What ‘s the difference between social contacts in real life and on the Internet?

Müller: Our studies of people who use chat rooms and newsgroups show that the boundary between online and offline is disappearing—young people, in particular, are fusing both worlds in their social contacts. Most of them get together offline in places like discos after making the first contact on the Internet. In companies too, online and offline contacts are increasingly gaining equal status.

Are such virtual communities built on relatively shaky foundations?

Müller: Not necessarily, but maintaining stability can be a challenging task. Many groups stick together when they have a long-term common interest—that can be stamp collecting, Indonesian cooking or old tube amplifiers. The important thing is that the members have control. By using too much organization and oversight—which is unfortunately the case with many companies—you can squeeze the life out of a virtual community.

What sort of people get involved in a virtual community, and why?

Müller: Activities on the Internet essentially attract the same types of people who generally get involved in groups. A boost in prestige is certainly one motivation. For instance, some people will invest a lot of time and energy in helping others. The driving force can be a conviction about life—something like, "If I help somebody today, somebody will help me tomorrow." A good example is open-source programmers who make their products generally available without any commercial interest in mind. Companies could learn a lot here.

What role will virtual communities play in ten years?

Müller: In his science-fiction novel Snow Crash, Neil Stephenson described cyborgs who had cell-phone antennas implanted directly into their brains. As a result of these transplants, the cyborgs constantly transmit their audiovisual impressions back to a headquarters and receive orders. We don’t necessarily need implants, but thanks to video-capable UMTS cell phones, we may be online all the time some day soon, letting those around us know exactly what we’re seeing, hearing and feeling.

                                                                       Interview conducted by Bernd Müller