Jason and Moon met with Dr. Winfield, the manager of the UHS at the University of Michigan, to determine the value and potential efficacy of a system such as our proposed Twine.  Overall, Dr. Winfield indicated that a system like Twine may present itself as a distraction to employees, and despite any benefits that he would be resistent to adopt any technology with the potential to act as a distraction.  However, we were able to assess a few salient points introduced by Dr. Winfield:

  • Security is a potent issue for any organization and particularly those in the health industry
  • Anonymity would annul HR’s ability to respond to individual concerns
  • Introduce sampling techniques to elucidate information from noise
  • Distraction is a significant problem that needs to be addressed

Dr. Winfield also gave us contact information for Tim Wood, Senior HR Director for UM who might be willing to sit down for an interview with our team.  Minutes are given below.

Meeting Minutes – February 10, 2009 – Dr. Winfield Interview

  1. Dr. Winfield is the manager for UHS employees

    1. Coming at this from Healthcare professional perspective

  2. Healthcare professionals are paranoid about IT security

    1. Given that they’re dealing with confidential patient information

    2. Discourage, essentially BAN, unencrypted forms of instant communication

      1. No AIM

  3. Brought up a really good point about the value of an “anonymous suggestion box” if the HR person can’t respond to person directly…

    1. If someone anonymously posts “I wish I had a snickers bar!”, and you had a snickers bar to give them, the system fails in that it gives you no way to give them the snickers bar.

    2. Made me think about having a check box for “Anonymous?” so they user can decide if they want their post to be anonymous.

      1. Now we have the following options for user input:

        1. Positive (submits tweet)

        2. Negative (submits tweet)

        3. Anonymous (attribute for tweet)

  4. Brought up the idea of sampling

    1. Beneficial because

      1. Less “noise”

        1. Although our system would supposedly make sense of that “noise” or just ignore it

      2. Higher quality input

        1. True, but again supposedly our system would generate quality output from lots of individually somewhat meaningless input from the employees

    2. I think we are implicitly doing this with the idea of a little bubble popping up after an hour of inactivity and asking “How are you doing?” or something along those lines

  5. Brought up the idea that he thinks any person in a management position would be hard pressed to purposefully implement something that is a distraction to their employees.

    1. Likened our system to “AIM” or instant messaging and how his kids are always on it and never listening when he’s trying to have a conversation with them.

    2. Made me think about how important it is that we design this system such that users don’t get “lost” in it’s content.

      1. Shouldn’t be an endless pit of replies to other tweets.

      2. How can we provide incentive for people to contribute to a system in which they don’t get much back, except a soapbox at the water cooler?

  6. Gave me the name and number of Tim Wood, Senior HR Director for UM who might be willing to sit down for an interview

    1. Wolverine Tower: 734-763-5431

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