Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Knowledge ...

Applying Web Analytics Tools in <strong>the</strong> Context <strong>of</strong> Enterprise
Social S<strong>of</strong>tware
Alexander Schneider and Alexander Steinh<strong>of</strong>f
Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany
schneial@in.tum.de
steinh<strong>of</strong>@in.tum.de
Abstract: Web analytics tools are now in operation for about 15 years. While primarily developed to support <strong>the</strong>
operators <strong>of</strong> public commercial web sites, <strong>the</strong>y <strong>of</strong>fer a stable and mature set <strong>of</strong> general features to track <strong>the</strong>
behavior <strong>of</strong> users <strong>of</strong> arbitrary web based systems. Independently, in recent years web based social s<strong>of</strong>tware is
increasingly used to support collaboration and knowledge exchange in modern enterprises. This paper examines
how enterprise social s<strong>of</strong>tware can benefit from <strong>the</strong> features provided by state <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> art web analytics
solutions.In <strong>the</strong> first part <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> paper, we give an overview <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> most common capabilities <strong>of</strong> commercial and
open source web analytics tools and examine how <strong>the</strong> data <strong>the</strong>y produce can be accessed and utilized by o<strong>the</strong>r
applications. Subsequently, illustrating how social s<strong>of</strong>tware users – be it as authors or consumers <strong>of</strong> content –,
site operators and even <strong>the</strong> s<strong>of</strong>tware developers can pr<strong>of</strong>it from this integration. To demonstrate <strong>the</strong> general
feasibility <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> approach, we <strong>the</strong>n describe how one scenario was implemented in a commercial web based
enterprise collaboration platform using an open source web analytics tool. The current popularity <strong>of</strong> individual
documents, like wiki pages or blog posts, was measured using <strong>the</strong> number <strong>of</strong> recent visits for <strong>the</strong> respective web
pages. The resulting metric was <strong>the</strong>n used to improve <strong>the</strong> document scoring mechanism <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> platform's search
component. Finally we show that <strong>the</strong> web analytics tool can in turn be used to track precisely how <strong>the</strong> search
functionality is used – and thus allows for an assessment <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> effectiveness <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> abovementioned
improvement. It fur<strong>the</strong>r enables a qualitative analysis <strong>of</strong> user behavior that helps to find defects in <strong>the</strong> s<strong>of</strong>tware
and additionally motivates fur<strong>the</strong>r refinements and enhancements.
Keywords: Enterprise 2.0, Social S<strong>of</strong>tware, Web Analytics, Intranet Search
1. Introduction
Web analytics tools as well as social s<strong>of</strong>tware have reached a mature state over <strong>the</strong> last few years
and todays s<strong>of</strong>tware products in both categories range from commercial all-in-one solutions through to
free-to-use applications and open source projects. While web analytics in general has an enormous
potential regarding insights in social processes (Watts 2007), it is applied primarily in <strong>the</strong> e-commerce
sector. However, recently, <strong>the</strong> blogging community also discovered <strong>the</strong> potentials <strong>of</strong> web analytics:
wordpress (http://www.wordpress.com), for example, has an integrated stats system <strong>of</strong>fering basic
web analytics reports to blog authors. In this paper, we investigate how <strong>the</strong> capabilities <strong>of</strong> web
analytics tools can be exploited in <strong>the</strong> context <strong>of</strong> enterprise social s<strong>of</strong>tware, be it by automatically
processing tracking data to improve certain functionalities, like search – similar to (Agichtein et al.
2006; Joachims et al. 2007) who focus on web search – or by manually reviewing analysis reports to
identify potentials for improvements. The latter has found to be useful for developers for example to
discover usability issues (Weischedel and Huizingh 2006). We suggest that <strong>the</strong>re is a large variety <strong>of</strong>
stakeholders who can benefit from <strong>the</strong> integration <strong>of</strong> a web analytics tool with an Enterprise 2.0
solution.
Chapter 2 provides an overview <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> foundations <strong>of</strong> web analytics as well as challenges arising
when <strong>the</strong>y are integrated with social s<strong>of</strong>tware. Chapter 3 depicts <strong>the</strong> results <strong>of</strong> a web analytics tool
analysis and describes <strong>the</strong> features that are relevant for social s<strong>of</strong>tware. Derived from this analysis,
Chapter 4 proposes opportunities how web analytics data can be used to support social s<strong>of</strong>tware
users. Subsequently, Chapter 5 depicts <strong>the</strong> prototypic implementation <strong>of</strong> one scenario and <strong>the</strong> results
<strong>of</strong> an evaluation period. Finally, Chapter 6 summarizes this paper and provides suggestions for fur<strong>the</strong>r
research.
2. Foundation <strong>of</strong> web analytics and social s<strong>of</strong>tware
This section gives an overview <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> distinct knowledge domains <strong>of</strong> web analytics and enterprise
social s<strong>of</strong>tware and analyzes specific challenges for web analytics tools operating in an Enterprise 2.0
environment.
899