In Response to a Research Opportunity / Challenge (articulated by Joerg Beringer):
Research project on SAP Customer Communities (Paul Hofmann)
Identifiying the type and quality of information which is exchanged within
such communities and analyze value for SAP with respect to its suitability
to drive product improvements and innovation. As a results we should get some
insights about if and how to instrument such user communities in an efficient
way for co-designing products.
Web 2.0 environments (characterized by social production, mass communication,
democratizing innovation, and collaborative design) represent communities
of active contributors and designers and have opened new possibilities for
user/designer (or prosumer) driven evolution of socio-technical environments.
The opportunity for SAP is to understand how their software environments
can take advantage of these opportunities to reach new levels of innovation,
collaboration, and creativity.
We will use an innovative conceptual framework (further discussed below)
grounded in
as a starting point to analyze current user communities associated with SAP products in order to understand the state of practice. Based on this understanding, we will explore issues that needed to be addressed to integrate better user participation in the development and evolution of SAP products. At the same time, we will refine our initial conceptual framework based on empirical data and provide a guide for the design and development of future products and user communities.
In this proposed research, we intend to use meta-design as both an analytic framework and a design framework. Using meta-design as an analytic framework, we seek to develop a better understanding of user participations in user communities associated with SAP products. Based on this better understanding, we will propose intervening strategies and techniques to re-design the social infrastructure for sustained user participations that in the end lead to better product design, support and evolution.
We propose to conduct this research through the following stages and activities:
Stage 1 (1 week on site study): The goal of this stage is to develop an initial understanding of one or two user communities of SAP products. One or two researchers from University of Colorado will visit SAP and talk to the developers of SAP products, examining existing data of user communities, selecting one or two projects for focus study, and take relevant data and information back to University of Colorado for through and systematic examination.
Stage 2 (6 months off site analysis): The goal of this stage to systematically examine the information produced by users of the selected projects to understand:
During this stage, researchers form University of Colorado will meet with SAP developers and users.
Stage 3 (1 week on site study): The goal of this stage is to present initial analysis to SAP designers to receive feedback.
Web 2.0 environments have focused on the rapid emergence of a new type of software systems that heavily rely on the contributions by a community of users. Many systems, such as Wikipedia, Flickr, Second Life, 3D Warehouse, and Open Source Software (OSS) projects, are created through the collaboration of many contributors who are regarded as designers and partners by bringing their unique set of skills and expertise to shape the functionality and utility of the software systems. The success of such systems is determined not only by the initial functionality of the software artifact, but in fundamental ways by the active participation of users through the formation of user communities. In these systems, the roles of users and developers are blurred and design extends into use time. This calls for the creation of new methodological frameworks that re-delineate the roles of developers and users, re-distribute the design activities over the life cycle of the software systems, and give equal importance to the design of technical functionality and the design of social conditions for wide and sustained participation of users.
The Meta-Design Framework. Meta-design is a new methodological framework that we have proposed to address the above challenge. Meta-design characterizes objectives, techniques, and processes for creating new media and environments that allow “owners of problems” to act as designers. A fundamental objective of meta-design is to create socio-technical environments that empower users to engage actively in the continuous development of systems rather than being restricted to the use of existing systems. Meta-design aims at defining and creating not only technical infrastructures for the software system but also social infrastructure in which users can participate actively as co-designers to shape and reshape the socio-technical systems through collaboration.
Re-defining the Roles of Users and Developers. In the world of software, users and developers are conventionally regarded as two mutually exclusive groups of people. Users are those people who own a problem, and developers are those who construct software systems for the users. However with the emergence of Web 2.0 environments, the distinction between users and developers is quickly disappearing. It is therefore necessary to understand how the roles of users and developers are transformed during the lifecycle of a particular software product.
Redistributing the Design Activity. In all design processes, two basic stages can be differentiated: design time and use time [4]. At design time, system developers (with or without user participation) create environments and tools for the world as imagined by them to anticipate users’ needs and objectives. At use time, users use the system in the world as experienced. Existing design frameworks are based on the assumption that major design activities end at a certain point after which the system enters use time. Meta-design complements and transcends these design methodologies by creating open and continuously evolvable systems that can be collaboratively extended and redesigned at use time by users and user communities.
Re-thinking the Openness of Software Systems. Software systems have conventionally two major elements: code and documents. Both elements are divided into two parts: those for developers and those for users and they are mostly mutually exclusive.
To enable users to participate directly in the evolution and design of software systems, we need to rethink the degree of openness that a software system is exposed to users. In other words, some of the source code and development documents that are previously kept secret from users need to be made open to users. This decision needs to be balanced against several competing concerns: the protection of intellectual properties and the leverage of user innovations, the complete control of system functionality and the natural evolution of products at the hands of users.
Nurturing User Communities. Meta-design is not merely end-user modification and programming. Meta-designed software systems do not only provide the technical means for users to customize and extend the systems but they provide social and technical mechanisms to facilitate user participation and collaboration during the design activities. It is necessary to create a user community around a particular software product for users to interact with each other and to interact with the original designers of the software product.
Co-Evolution of Product and User Community. For a software project to have a sustainable development through the contributions of users, the system and the user community must co-evolve. Our studies have found that a large base of contributing members is one of the most important success factors of open source systems (OSS). The evolution of an OSS community is effected by the contributions made by its aspiring and motivated members. Such contributions not only transform the role and influence of their contributors in the community and thus evolve the whole community, but they are the sources of the evolution of the system. The opposite is also true; any modification, improvement, and extension made to an OSS system not only evolves the system but redefines the role of the contributing members and thus changes the social dynamics of the OSS community.
To enable for the co-evolution to take place, the user community needs social mechanisms that recognize user contributions and reward contributing users with higher social visibility and increased influences on users and products as well. Actively contributing users should be able to migrate their roles as Passive Users to Core Members who can directly influence the direction and evolution of the software system. This means the partial transfer of controls from corporate designers to user-turned-designers in the user community.