Sunday 27 May 2012

“Decision 2.0: An Exploratory Case Study”

Ahmed Elragal and Ola El-Telbany (2012). “Decision 2.0: An Exploratory Case Study”. In: 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Science (HICSS). Los Alamitos, CA, USA: IEEE Computer Society, pp. 432–443

Abstract

The emergence of the Enterprise 2.0 technologies indicates that they can provide value to different types of users and potentially different types of value. Many published research explored what these E2.0 tools and applications can offer to organizations, such as collaboration platforms, social networking and user-created content, enhancing their productivity and management among employees. However, little research was devoted to study the effect these tools and applications have on the decision making process. Decision 2.0 has received little attention in literature, especially from the standpoint of making use of the “crowd”. Therefore, this paper focuses on this research gap with a case study in an attempt to elucidate and extract knowledge to answer this question “How does decision 2.0 make use of the crowd to support the traditional decision making process and hence add value to organizations through collaboration and collective intelligence?”

Review

After reading Elragal and El-Telbany, 2012: “Decision 2.0: An Exploratory Case Study”, I was a bit disappointed. I hoped to read something more specific, like a concept for collaborative decision making, focusing on using Enterprise 2.0 tools within organizations to improve organizational decision making processes.

The theoretical part of this paper is in general well written and an interesting read. Most notable is perhaps the reference to Herbert Simon’s decision making model. Simon, 1979: “Rational decision making in business organizations” seems to me to be a good starting point for exploring rational decision making further. For more information about Herbert Simon’s approach to rational decision making, Wikipedia contributors and Sun, 2012: "Administrative Behavior — Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia" and Michalek, 2003: "Herbert Simon Collection" seem to be reasonable resources.

The case study then describes a situation where customers, “the crowd”, were enabled to provide input for decision making. Much like any social media campaign that involves a poll as feedback channel. In the case study, involving the customer and thus using the “wisdom of the crowd” finally changed the decision anticipated by the management and ultimately “positively impacted all the brands’ major key performance indicators”. That is a good point to make, just perhaps a bit obvious.

Altogether, the paper is an interesting read if you are interested in business management, marketing and social media, but not so much if you are interested in knowledge management and Enterprise 2.0.

References

Elragal and El-Telbany, 2012: “Decision 2.0: An Exploratory Case Study”
Elragal, Ahmed and Ola El-Telbany (2012). “Decision 2.0: An Exploratory Case Study”. In: 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Science (HICSS). Los Alamitos, CA, USA: IEEE Computer Society, pp. 432–443.
Simon, 1979: “Rational decision making in business organizations”
Simon, H.A. (1979). “Rational decision making in business organizations”. In: The American economic review 69.4, pp. 493–513.
Wikipedia contributors and Sun, 2012: "Administrative Behavior — Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia"
Wikipedia contributors and Richard KP Sun (2012). Administrative Behavior — Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. url: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Administ rative_Behavior&oldid=493987241 (visited on 27 May 2012).
Michalek, 2003: "Herbert Simon Collection"
Michalek, Gabrielle V. (2003). Herbert Simon Collection. url: http://diva.library.cmu.edu/Simon/ (visited on 27 May 2012).

Thursday 3 May 2012

An Introduction

Recently some friends told me about an idea they had. Basically, they wanted to read more scientific papers and decided to set up a blog where they could post comments on the papers they read. So they started paper.kennt-wayne.de.

This sounded like a good plan to me, and I joined them and started reading and commenting.

However, I decided to publish my comments, or reviews, or whatever you want to call these strongly opinionated summaries not there, but on my own little platform.

My plan is to publish one post a week. Sometimes posts could be longer and more elaborated, sometimes shorter and less sophisticated. But I will always stick to a basic structure, starting with a full citation including a link to the free or non-free paper. Followed by an "Abstract" section with the paper's abstract, copied from the paper, probably with emphasis by me. My actual contribution to this whole thing will be labeled "Review" and include my very personal comments, considerations, ideas, and anything else that I want to mention in relation to this paper. The final section will be optional and contain further "References" as full citations, when I mention additional resources in my review. If I notice that this structure doesn't work, I might change it.

If you agree or disagree with my comments, please feel free to leave a note. I am happy to discuss about the papers and my comments, as that is the purpose of this project: reading and discussing papers to achieve a better understanding and gain new insights into the world of Enterprise 2.0 and what I view as loosely or closely related to it.

If you wonder what Enterprise 2.0 is, here is the definition from Wikipedia: "Enterprise 2.0 aims to help employees, customers and suppliers collaborate, share, and organize information via Web 2.0 technologies." This term was coined by Andrew McAfee in 2006. Recently some people began talking about enterprise social software or even social business when they refer to Enterprise 2.0 solutions. I decided to stay with the term Enterprise 2.0 for now.

In addition to reviewing papers here, I also keep a list of bookmarks at d.me/goetz/enterprise2.0. If you don't like my comments, perhaps you can at least find something interesting there.

To get in touch you could send an email to goetz@buerkle.org, find me on Google+ via goetz.buerkle.org/+, or on Twitter as @goetzb.