Worknet

Last updated March 20, 2022

A worknet is the term coined to describe a group of online participants and applications to collaborate a certain cause or purpose. It is an area that is concerned with the intersection of organizational behavior and computer science. The activity is called worknetting and was described in 2007 as a new trend for 2008 in the bulletin for marketeers^[1] and was further discussed and developed at the Web 2.0 Expo 2008^[2] in San Francisco.

Worknetting is a new development and can be seen as the next step forward from social networking on the internet^{[ citation needed ]}. Where social networking focuses on building online relations for participants, based on personal or organizational profiles and allowing them to communicate together, a worknet enables a network of people and organizations to collaborate and do business based on a common interest, such as in project collaboration, co-creating of products or policy, organizing events, administration, sharing experiences etc. This activity is called worknetting. The group of participants and the relevant applications together constitute a worknet.

Worknetting can be done between people in different organizations, but also within an organization. Heather M. Caruso et al. describes in "Boundaries Need Not Be Barriers: Leading Collaboration among Groups in Decentralized Organizations" that "no matter how a multi-divisional organization is designed, it needs to find effective ways to spontaneously and responsively coordinate information and activity across its resulting units".^[3] Worknets can also enable communication in and between communities of practice, which as described by E. L. Lesser et al. in "Communities of practice and organizational performance" delivers social capital: "By developing connections among practitioners who may or may not be colocated [...] communities of practice serve as generators for social capital".^[4]

The Worknet Institute^[5] aims to promote the practice of worknetting worldwide.

The concept of a worknet has evolved from the view that although many applications currently exist on the Internet as stand alone applications to do business and work together (such as Google Docs) most are scattered and thus create a "foggy workspace" for cross-organizational and interpersonal cooperation. And they are not linked to people or organizational profiles, thereby reducing the possible trust-level required to do business over the Internet. This is further complicated by the fact that many stakeholders operate in a number of closed networks (often called portals) at the same time which requires participants to have several profiles for every portal they participate in. A worknet enables networked group collaboration, a community relevant to the purpose and the tools relevant to that purpose combined in one space.

A big difference between social networks and a worknet is not only the type of collaboration applications which are offered to participants beyond mere networking and communication, it also is the approach: Worknetting does not take the participant as the point of departure, trying to enable the participants many purposes with applications, but it takes the common denominator between participants as the point of departure, drawing in different actors and applications to further that single cause.

An early basic online form of worknetting can be seen in worknets.com.^[6] The provision of the online worknet as a platform facilitating a collaborative group is evolving with new web technologies providing new ways to enable teams, communities and networks worldwide.

From an organizational behavior point of view, the trend is to see people empowered and large companies become networks, a phenomenon which has been called the network society. This has been popularized by Jan van Dijk in his book De Netwerkmaatschappij (1991). This is made possible in part by social computing which has become more widely known because of its relationship to a number of recent trends. These include the growing popularity of social software and Web 2.0, increased academic interest in social network analysis, the rise of open source as a viable method of production, and a growing conviction that all of this can have a profound impact on daily life. A February 13, 2006 paper by market research company Forrester Research suggested that:

Easy connections brought about by cheap devices, modular content, and shared computing resources are having a profound impact on our global economy and social structure. Individuals increasingly take cues from one another rather than from institutional sources like corporations, media outlets, religions, and political bodies. To thrive in an era of Social Computing, companies must abandon top-down management and communication tactics, weave communities into their products and services, use employees and partners as marketers, and become part of a living fabric of brand loyalists.^[7]

Collaboration between companies has shown to be a key driver of business performance.^[8] "As a general rule, global companies that collaborate better, perform better. Those that collaborate less, do not perform as well. It’s just that simple." Collaboration between companies will be between the professionals employed by those companies. Worknets enable setting up and maintaining the inter-company relationships.

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Intranet Network of private resources in an organization

An intranet is a computer network for sharing information, easier communication, collaboration tools, operational systems, and other computing services within an organization, usually to the exclusion of access by outsiders. The term is used in contrast to public networks, such as the Internet, but uses most of the same technology based on the Internet protocol suite.

Collaborative software or groupware is application software designed to help people working on a common task to attain their goals. One of the earliest definitions of groupware is "intentional group processes plus software to support them".

Social software, also known as social apps, include communication and interactive tools often based on the Internet. Communication tools typically handle the capturing, storing and presentation of communication, usually written but increasingly including audio and video as well. Interactive tools handle mediated interactions between a pair or group of users. They focus on establishing and maintaining a connection among users, facilitating the mechanics of conversation and talk. Social software generally refers to software that makes collaborative behaviour, the organisation and moulding of communities, self-expression, social interaction and feedback possible for individuals. Another element of the existing definition of social software is that it allows for the structured mediation of opinion between people, in a centralized or self-regulating manner. The most improved area for social software is that Web 2.0 applications can all promote cooperation between people and the creation of online communities more than ever before.

Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) is the study of how people utilize technology collaboratively, often towards a shared goal. CSCW addresses how computer systems can support collaborative activity and coordination. More specifically, the field of CSCW seeks to analyze and draw connections between currently understood human psychological and social behaviors and available collaborative tools, or groupware. Often the goal of CSCW is to help promote and utilize technology in a collaborative way, and help create new tools to succeed in that goal. These parallels allow CSCW research to inform future design patterns or assist in the development of entirely new tools.

Collaboration is the process of two or more people, entities or organizations working together to complete a task or achieve a goal. Collaboration is similar to cooperation. Most collaboration requires leadership, although the form of leadership can be social within a decentralized and egalitarian group. Teams that work collaboratively often access greater resources, recognition and rewards when facing competition for finite resources.

A collaboration tool helps people to collaborate. The purpose of a collaboration tool is to support a group of two or more individuals to accomplish a common goal or objective. Collaboration tools can be either of a non-technological nature such as paper, flipcharts, post-it notes or whiteboards. They can also include software tools and applications such as collaborative software.

An online community of practice (OCoP), also known as a virtual community of practice (VCoP), is a community of practice (CoP) that is developed on, and is maintained using the Internet. To qualify as an OCoP, the characteristics of a community of practice (CoP) as described by Lave and Wenger must be met. To this end, an OCoP must include active members who are practitioners, or "experts," in the specific domain of interest. Members must participate in a process of collective learning within their domain. Additionally, social structures must be created within the community to assist in knowledge creation and sharing. Knowledge must be shared and meaning negotiated within an appropriate context. Community members must learn through both instruction-based learning and group discourse. Finally, multiple dimensions must facilitate the long-term management of support as well as enable immediate synchronous interactions.

Social computing is an area of computer science that is concerned with the intersection of social behavior and computational systems. It is based on creating or recreating social conventions and social contexts through the use of software and technology. Thus, blogs, email, instant messaging, social network services, wikis, social bookmarking and other instances of what is often called social software illustrate ideas from social computing.

Enterprise architecture (EA) is an analytical discipline that provides methods to comprehensively define, organize, standardize, and document an organization’s structure and interrelationships in terms of certain critical business domains characterizing the entity under analysis. The goal of EA is to create an effective representation of the business enterprise that may be used at all levels of stewardship to guide, optimize, and transform the business as it responds to real-world conditions. EA serves to capture the relationships and interactions between domain elements as described by their processes, functions, applications, events, data, and employed technologies.

A value network is a graphical illustration of social and technical resources within/between organizations and how they are utilized. The nodes in a value network represent people or, more abstractly, roles. The nodes are connected by interactions that represent deliverables. These deliverables can be objects, knowledge or money. Value networks record interdependence. They account for the worth of products and services. Companies have both internal and external value networks.

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A network-centric organization is a network governance pattern which empowers knowledge workers to create and leverage information to increase competitive advantage through the collaboration of small and agile self-directed teams. It is emerging in many progressive 21st century enterprises. This implies new ways of working, with consequences for the enterprise’s infrastructure, processes, people and culture.

Social project management is a non-traditional way of organizing projects and performing project management. It is, in its simplest form, the outcome of the application of the social networking paradigm to the context of project ecosystems, as a continued response to the movement toward distributed, virtual teams. Distributed virtual teams lose significant communication value normally present when groups are collocated. Because of this, social project management is motivated by a philosophy of the maximizing of open, and continuous communication, both inside and outside the team. Because it is a response to new organizing structures that require technologically mediated communications, Social Project Management is most often enabled by the use of Collaborative software inspired by social media. This paradigm enables the project work to be published as activity stream and publicized via the integration with the social network of an organization. Social project management embraces both the historical best practices of Project management, and the open collaboration of Web 2.0.

Collaborative decision-making (CDM) software is a software application or module that helps to coordinate and disseminate data and reach consensus among work groups.

Cloud collaboration is a method of sharing and co-authoring computer files via cloud computing, whereby documents are uploaded to a central "cloud" for storage, where they can then be accessed by other users. Cloud collaboration technologies allow users to upload, comment and collaborate on documents and even amend the document itself, evolving the document. Businesses in the last few years have increasingly been switching to use of cloud collaboration.

Collaborative workflow is the convergence of social software with service management (workflow) software. As the definition implies, collaborative workflow is derived from both workflow software and social software such as chat, instant messaging, and document collaboration.

Collaborative partnerships are agreements and actions made by consenting organizations to share resources to accomplish a mutual goal. Collaborative partnerships rely on participation by at least two parties who agree to share resources, such as finances, knowledge, and people. Organizations in a collaborative partnership share common goals. The essence of collaborative partnership is for all parties to mutually benefit from working together.

A mobile workspace is a user’s portable working environment that gives them access to the applications, files and services they need to do their job no matter where they are.

Distributed Collaboration is a way of collaboration wherein participants, regardless of their location, work together to reach a certain goal. This usually entails use of increasingly popular cyberinfrastructure, such as emails, instant messaging and document sharing platforms to reduce the limitations of the users trying to work together from remote locations by overcoming physical barriers of geolocation and also to some extent, depending on the application used, the effects of working together in person. For example, a caller software that can be used to bring all collaborators into a single call-in for easier dissemination of ideas.

Worknet

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