06 Information und Dokumentation
The BECS project investigates the benefits arising from the adoption and use of Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS).
ECS are large-scale collaboration technology infrastructures that provide the software functionality to enable workgroups to organise online team meetings, to create and share information, to coordinate workflows and to collaborate on joint projects, regardless of the location and timing of work activities.
When ECS are introduced into organisations there are initial expectations about what can be gained from the system, e.g. improved collaboration, improved communication across silos, etc. Over time, as users gain experience using the system, ideas about what can be achieved change and the ECS become embedded into organisational work practices. However, identifying and understanding the expected benefits of ECS, how they evolve over time, and how they contribute to organisational performance is challenging due to a lack of suitable methods and tools to describe (profile), measure and monitor ECS benefits.
The BECS project addresses this challenge; the primary focus is on identifying, measuring and monitoring the benefits that arise from ECS implementation and use over time. Through the development of in-depth longitudinal case studies of ECS adoption in leading organisations in the DACH region and empirical analyses of collaboration system use, the research:
i) developed practical tools and methods for the measurement of ECS benefits and benefits profiling;
ii) provides greater insights into how benefits management is experienced and constituted in practice; and
iii) developed a novel and integrated framework that assists researchers and practitioners to coordinate their efforts in developing, implementing and evaluating ECS benefits.
The project delivered both practical and theoretical outcomes. The methods and tools developed in the BECS project have been applied in organisations and delivered useful and useable results enabling organisations to understand and monitor the evolving benefits of their ECS. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, this work became of even greater importance as new uses of ECS emerged when organisations adopted large-scale support for hybrid and remote working initiatives.
The research findings also provide key theoretical concepts and analytical methods, including the MoBeC framework, Social Collaboration Analytics and Benefits Scorecards. These provide the foundation for subse-quent research projects to examine transformation to digital work and the development of a new stream of research into trace analysis and collaboration analytics more broadly.
In this article we analyze the privacy aspects of a mobile sensor application used for recording urban travel patterns as part of a travel-survey service. This service has been developed and field-tested within the Live+Gov EU Project. The privacy analysis follows a structured approach established in. Eight privacy recommendations are derived, and have already led to corresponding enhancements of the travel-survey service.