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Chapter 2 Global E-business and Collaboration 97

Dallas-based 7-Eleven Inc. has about 2,000 employees who have used
Yammer since May 2011. The convenience store chain deployed the applica-
tion to help field consultants, who work with local franchise owners, share their
knowledge and learn best practices from one another. For example, someone
might post a picture of a display that worked particularly well in one franchise
location for others to see and try in their locations. The social software creates
a “virtual water cooler" environment where people are able to talk about what's
going on in an informal way yet have formal documentation to keep track of
best practices.
Although 7-Eleven and other companies have benefited from enterprise
social networking, internal social networking has not caught on as quickly
as consumer uses of Facebook, Twitter, and other public social networking
products.

Checklist for Managers: Evaluating and Selecting
Collaboration and Social Software Tools
With so many collaboration and social business tools and services avail-
able, how do you choose the right collaboration technology for your firm?
To answer this question, you need a framework for understanding just what
problems these tools are designed to solve. One framework that has been
helpful for us to talk about collaboration tools is the time/space collabora-
tion matrix developed in the early 1990s by a number of collaborative work
scholars (Figure 2.8).
The time/space matrix focuses on two dimensions of the collaboration
problem: time and space. For instance, you need to collaborate with people in
different time zones and you cannot all meet at the same time. Midnight in
New York is noon in Bombay, so this makes it difficult to have a videoconfer-
ence (the people in New York are too tired). Time is clearly an obstacle to
collaboration on a global scale.

FIGURE 2.8 THE TIME/SPACE COLLABORATION AND SOCIAL TOOL MATRIX

Collaboration and social technologies can be classified in terms of whether they support interactions
at the same or different time or place, and whether these interactions are remote or colocated.

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