BlackTie: Injecting elements of formality into enterprise social software

Successful organizations rely on a healthy mixture of formal and informal structures to coordinate effectively and operate efficiently. Formal structures, such as documented business processes, are valuable when they can be applied successfully to new contexts and because they provide a high degree of visibility and traceability during their application. When they fail, or are simply not available, an organization relies on its informal structures and the human capacity for innovation to continue operating. Despite their resiliency, informal structures are not as easily understandable which can make them difficult for outsiders to learn, comprehend, and audit. Although formal structures are often the byproducts of recurrent patterns of ad-hoc collaboration, most cooperative tools cannot externalize usage data into human readable artifacts that can be systematically reused and evolved. In this paper we introduce BlackTie, a collaborative system designed to extract tangible and reusable models of collaboration during ad-hoc interaction and facilitate their reuse and evolution over time.