CEIR Report
ISSN 2751-5109
2025,1
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.
2024,2
The literature contains very few publications on the application of Process Mining methods for the analysis of event logs in Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS). This is not surprising because the analysis of digital support for collaborative work is extremely intricate due to various challenges relating to a lack of data access, poor data quality, unstructured processes and a lack of descriptive models. This article reports on the findings from an Action Design Research (ADR) project. The ADR team had access to a large instance of an operational ECS with more than 3000 users. The event log contains several million entries. Together with the platform’s operating team, intensive research was carried out over a period of six years on ways of analysing user activities on the platform. Several cycles were run to develop new methods and computational techniques to decipher the event logs and meaningfully describe the processes recorded in them. Thanks to the close collaboration between the researchers and the operators of the collaboration platform, it was possible to compare the real-world processes carried out in the platform with the processes discovered using a novel method for Social Process Mining (SPM). The result is a pattern analysis that discovers patterns in processes that have a high degree of correspondence with the real-world scenes of collaborative work. The research work has now reached a point where other software products are included (multi-system analysis) and a catalogue of collaborative work situations (scenes) has been developed to describe the process patterns that result from the Process Mining and graph-based analysis techniques.
2024,1
Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS) sind essentielle Werkzeuge für die Unterstützung der digitalen Zusammenarbeit und ad hoc Projektarbeit in Unternehmen. Mit der zunehmenden Nutzung von ECS steigen auch die Bedeutung und der Bedarf an Analysen zur Schaffung eines verbesserten Verständnisses von digitaler Arbeit. Da Kollaboration sich regelmäßig über mehr als ein System erstreckt, stellt die Heterogenität der Daten verschiedener Systeme für Analysen eine Herausforderung dar, insbesondere weil plattformübergreifende Nutzungsmuster nicht ohne Weiteres nachverfolgbar und vergleichbar sind. Daher wurde die „Collaborative Actions on Documents Ontology“ (ColActDOnt) entwickelt, um Konzepte aus ECS (z. B. Events und Dokumente) einheitlich zu beschreiben. Basierend auf der ColActDOnt wurde ein Datastore implementiert, in welchem die Daten verschiedener Systeme in der Struktur der Ontologie gespeichert werden. Durch den ontologiebasierten Datastore stehen die Daten für Analysen in einheitlicher Form zur Verfügung. In die Datenebene wurden Daten aus dem ECS HCL Connections (CNX), welches somit das initiale Quellsystem darstellt, importiert. Mittels der ColActDOnt wurde außerdem eine abstrakte Ontologieebene mit den Elementen der Ontologie geschaffen. Die Elemente beider Ebenen sind über Beziehungen innerhalb einer Graphdatenbank miteinander und untereinander verknüpft.
Der ontologiebasierte Datenzugriff ermöglicht es dem Benutzer ohne Kenntnisse über die Datenstrukturen des Quellsystems, lediglich mit Domänenwissen über die ColActDOnt, Inhalte abzufragen.
Der Datastore ist als Graphdatenbank (Neo4j) implementiert und somit können Abfragen nativ als Graphenstrukturen visualisiert werden. Weiterhin kann der Prototyp an Business Intelligence Tools wie Microsoft PowerBI angebunden werden und bietet somit die Möglichkeit für tiefergehende Analysen. Die erste Version des Datastores stellt einen wichtigen Schritt in Richtung der Harmonisierung von Trace Data aus ECS dar. In Zukunft sollen weitere Kollaborationssysteme an den Datastore angeschlossen werden, um systemübergreifende Analysen von komplexen Kollaborationsplattformen zu ermöglichen.
2022,1
Remote Working Study 2022
(2022)
The Remote Working Study 2022 is focused on the transition to work from home (WFH) triggered by the stay at home directives of 2020. These directives required employees to work in their private premises wherever possible to reduce the transmission of the coronavirus. The study, conducted by the Center for Enterprise Information Research (CEIR) at the University of Koblenz from December 2021 to January 2022, explores the transition to remote working.
The objective of the survey is to collect baseline information about organisations’ remote work experiences during and immediately following the COVID-19 lockdowns. The survey was completed by the key persons responsible for the implementation and/or management of the digital workplace in 19 German and Swiss organisations.
The data presented in this report was collected from member organisations of the IndustryConnect initiative. IndustryConnect is a university-industry research programme that is coordinated by researchers from the University of Koblenz. It focuses on research in the areas of the digital workplace and enterprise collaboration technologies, and facilitates the generation of new research insights and the exchange of experiences among user companies.
2021,1
Seit mehr als 10 Jahren forscht und lehrt das Team des Centers for Enterprise Research (CEIR) an der Universität Koblenz im Bereich der digitalen Unterstützung kollaborativer Arbeit in Unternehmen (Enterprise Collaboration) und untersucht den Aufbau und die Nutzung von Kollaborationstechnologie für den Digitalen Arbeitsplatz.
Der vorliegende CEIR Report mit dem Titel „Collaborative Actions on Documents Ontology (ColActDOnt)“ beschreibt die Entwicklung einer Ontologie für Benutzeraktionen an Content in Kollaborationssystemen (englisch: Enterprise Collaboration Systems). Die Arbeit an der Ontologie erfolgte im Rahmen eines DFG-Projekts mit dem Titel „Social Process Mining“. In diesem Projekt wurde eine Methode für das sogenannte „Cross-System Process Mining“ entwickelt. Cross-System Process Mining erlaubt die Analyse von Arbeitsprozessen, deren Ablauf von mehreren, heterogenen Kollaborationslösungen (z.B. HCL Connections, Alfresco, Skype) unterstützt werden. Aufgrund der Heterogenität der involvierten Systeme müssen die Logfiles der unterschiedlichen Softwaresysteme zunächst in einen gemeinsamen, harmonisierten Event-Log überführt werden. Die ColActDOnt stellt die notwendige Systematik für diese Harmonisierung zur Verfügung.
Die Ontologie wurde entwickelt in einer Reihe von interaktiven Workshops mit den Projektbeteiligten (Prof. Dr. Petra Schubert, Dr. Florian Schwade, Julian Mosen) unter der Leitung von Martin Just, der die Ergebnisse anschließend im Rahmen seiner Masterarbeit dokumentierte. Anschließend wurden die wichtigsten Teile in gekürzter Form in dem vorliegenden CEIR-Report veröffentlicht.
Mit den CEIR-Reports möchten wir ausgewählte wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse einem breiteren Publikum zur Verfügung stellen. Die in dieser Arbeit dargestellten Informationen sind für Unternehmen interessant, die an einer gezielten (Weiter-)Entwicklung ihrer Enterprise Collaboration Platform interessiert sind.
2015,1
Globally billions of dollars are invested on information systems and technology (IS/IT) to achieve business change. Understanding how value is generated and captured from these investments has been a key theme in information systems (IS) research for over 25 years. However, despite significant theoretical progress, organisations are still failing to achieve the full value of their investments and identifying and realising the benefits of IS/IT-enabled business change remains a challenge for both research and practice.
Our research is concerned with the business change associated with the introduction and use of new forms of enterprise collaboration system (ECS) that incorporate social software functionality (e.g. social profiles, blogs, wikis, activity streams, collaborative tagging etc). ECS represent a significant business investment; however, there remains uncertainty around the benefits and value arising from the introduction of these new types of ECS. Existing research studies on IS/IT benefits are focused primarily on traditional enterprise systems such as ERP systems. This article summarises the existing work that directly, or indirectly addresses IS benefits, to reveal four broad themes (i) evaluations of IS/IT investments (ii) measuring IS success (iii) classifying and measuring IS benefits and (iv) benefits realisation management.
The article concludes with an overview of the research on benefits management conducted in the Center for Enterpise Information Research at the University of Koblenz and the current research project investigating the benefit of enterprise collaboration systems (BECS).