Johnson: Unexpected Overlap Between ERP and Social Media

24.2.2014 14.00-16.00. Mikael Johnson. Unexpected Overlap between ERP and Social Media Services in Complex Developer–User Interaction Patterns

Venue: Open Innovation House, 2nd floor, Otaniementie 19b, Espoo.

This seminar talk concerns one of the significant under-researched topics of user involvement and user studies in design today: how to draw lessons from one service design case to another and compare similar or distant cases. The presentation is based on a recent paper (see below) and tackles, amongst other challenges, also the method crisis that Woolrych, Hornbæk, Frøkjær, and Cockton described so aptly in 2011. They suggested that methodological studies typically treat methods as indivisible wholes and that future studies would need to a) become more narrow (focus on method resources) and b) widen to cover practitioners’ work in full. Johnson’s seminar talk responds to this latter research agenda in elaborating on the significant contextual factors in comparing and contrasting apples and oranges, or in this case: social media and ERPs.

This presentation is based on an article that compares the development of, at the outset, two very different information infrastructures: a social media service and an enterprise resource planning system. Despite the differences, we found similarities in how vendors managed their service development and customer base. These similarities, particularly in user forums and user involvement routines, tell a story of complex developer-user interaction rather than seamless integration. This cross-case comparison contributes to building a framework for analysing user involvement across a broad range of cases.

Mikael Johnson, Hajar Mozaffar, Gian Marco Campagnolo, Sampsa Hyysalo, Neil Pollock & Robin Williams: The managed prosumer: evolving knowledge strategies in the design of information infrastructures. Information, Communication & Society. Published online, 25 Aug 2013.

Available here: http://sn.im/johnson_etal_prosumer

Mikael Johnson, software engineer and DSc from Aalto University with an interest in social and cultural studies of technology. His research themes are strategic user involvement, social media, and energy use. He works as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, a joint research institution of Aalto University and the University of Helsinki, Finland. http://people.aalto.fi/mikael_johnson