INSEMTIVES Tutorial ISWC2011 - Session2

The Telefonica Portal Use Case

www.insemtives.eu 1

Oksana Tokarchuk, German Toro Del Valle

Outline

• Theory in a nutshell – Economics and incentives – The concept of mechanism design – A tool for classifying situations – A tool for adjusting parameters/ideas

• The actual case study – Current status and preliminary findings – Next steps and prospected results

10/24/2011 www.insemtives.eu 2


Theory in a nutshell

What is the secret to success?

• Offer solution to a real problem: right solution at the right time


You can improve your chances to succeed

• Design of incentives: – Define the goal you want to reach with

incentives – Study the situation that needs to be

incentivized – Develop a set of rules that make individuals

achieve your goal in the given situation: “Mechanism design”


What kind of goals can be found in semantic application?

• Your ideas!!!!!!!


A tool for classifying situations: The multidimensional matrix


Goal Tasks Social Structure

Nature of good being produced

Communication level (about the

goal of the tasks)

High

Variety of High

Hierarchy neutral

Public good (non-rival

non-exclusive)

Medium Medium

Low Low

Participation level (in the

definition of the goal)

High

Specificity of

High Medium Medium

Low Low

Clarity level High Identification

with High

Hierarchical Private good

Low

Low Required skills

Highly specific Trivial/Common

The multidimensional matrix in practice: the task of annotation on Flickr


Goal Tasks Social Structure

Nature of good being produced


goal of the tasks)

High

Variety of High

Hierarchy neutral Public good

Medium Medium

Low Low



High

Specificity of

High Medium Medium

Low Low


with High


Low

Low Required skills

Highly specific Trivial/Common

Developing a model: Mechanism design

• Mechanism design is used in economics to develop a set of rules, incentives, that make you reach the result you want to achieve – Mechanism design sees a certain situation as sort

of a game that people play strategically in their own interests.

– You can define the rules of this game to reach the result you want


Example of mechanism design

• Think of employment contract: – Your interests: earn the most working the least – Employer’s interests: pay you the least and get the

most out of you – Employer offers you contract that defines the

rules that each party should follow


Mechanism design in practice

• You don’t need to be an expert in game theory to use mechanism design but you need to: – identify a set of games that better represents your

situation – Look what rules are recommended for these

games • Translate what economists do into concrete scenarios • Make sure that the economists’ proposals fit to the

real-life situation



Telefonica case study

Enterprise Knowledge Management at Telefónica

• Services of the intranet portal – Document management – Corporate directories – Pilot/Product/Service catalogues – News – Bank of ideas – Blogs, wikis, forums – Search engines

• Metrics – 1200 employees in 7 cities and 3

countries (↑) – ˜3050 visits per day, ˜56000 page

views (impressions) per day, average visit time: 20’

• Semantic solutions for enterprise knowledge management enhance how – Existing content and

knowledge are used and exploited (sometimes in novel, unexpected ways)

– Employees collaborate and interact within the team and with customers

Goal setting in Telefonica case study

• Generic goal: improve the usage of blogs in a corporation by annotations

• Concrete goal: increase the number of (useful) annotations


The multidimensional matrix for Telefonica: the environment


Goal Tasks Social Structure Nature of good being produced


goal of the tasks)

High

Variety of

High

Hierarchy neutral Public good

Medium Medium

Low Low



High

Specificity of

High Medium Medium

Low Low


with High


Low

Low Required skills Highly specific

Trivial/Common

The Mechanism design exercise in our case study (I)

• Interplay of two alternative games: – Principal agent game

• The management wants employees to do a certain action but do not have tools to check whether employees perform their best effort

• Management can implement various rules to motivate employees to work in its interests:

– Piece rate wages (labour intensive tasks) – Performance measurement (all levels of tasks) – Tournaments (internal labour market)


• Interplay of two alternative games (cont.): – Public goods game

• semantic content creation is a public good (non-excludable and non-rival)

• The problem of free riding


The Mechanism design exercise in our case study (II)

1° level of incentives for Telefonica (I)

• Competition for a prize: – To be acknowledged by management – Receive a prize

• What kind of prize: – Something that brings pleasure – Something that provides development of carrier – Trophy


1° level of incentives for Telefonica (II)

• Everyone (even employees ;-) ) like to play and to compete • ... and win prizes in return

1° level of incentives for Telefonica (III)

• Making everyday‘s tasks more fun

2° level of incentives, experts’ network and reputation (I)

• Telefonica is a highly competitive environment • Employees participate in an internal market to

be involved in projects • Problem: matching of demand of the project

and offer of labour (in terms of expertise)


2° level of incentives, experts’ network and reputation (III)

• Solution: annotations made by single user reveal his/her professional interests and area of expertize

• When people to be involved in the project are being searched, a simple check of keywords related to the project will show users that do annotations with these keywords


2° level of incentives, experts’ network and reputation (II)

• Reputation is very powerful motivation in an enterprise. • Show benefit of annotations expert network based on the

annotations.

2° level of incentives, experts’ network and reputation (IV)

• Implementation of this system as part of internal HR policy will motivate employees to annotate as much as possible on topics in which they would like to get a job

• Company solves 2 problems: – Blogs are annotated – It is a simple system to get a first idea of areas of

expertise and professional interests of individual employees and trace their development



Why do you need this?

Why do YOU need this? (I)

• You need to have a clear idea of what will motivate your users before you start your development process!

• Examples: 1st level, competition for the prize – Assignment and management of points – Different strategies to enhance competition:

• Leader boards, time to the end of competition, etc.

– Quality check of annotations



Why do YOU need this? (II)

• Examples: 2nd level, network of experts – Trace individual annotations – Search for users that make certain annotations – View of individual tag clouds


2° level of incentives, experts’ network and reputation (II)

• Reputation is very powerful motivation in an enterprise. • Show benefit of annotations expert network based on the

annotations.


Summing up

To sum up

• You assure at least 50% of success of your application if it solves concrete real problem of your users

• You can improve your chances to succeed by careful design of incentives: – Define your goal – Analyse your environment – Find the best system of incentives – Test


Technology

INSEMTIVES Tutorial ISWC2011 - Session2