1. The Telefonica Portal Use Case
Oksana Tokarchuk, German Toro Del Valle
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2. 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
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3. Theory in a nutshell
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4. What is the secret to success?
• Offer solution to a real problem: right solution
at the right time
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5. 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”
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6. What kind of goals can be
found in semantic application?
• Your ideas!!!!!!!
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7. A tool for classifying situations:
The multidimensional matrix
Social Nature of good
Goal Tasks
Structure being produced
Communication High High
level (about the Medium Variety of Medium Public good
goal of the tasks) Low Low (non-rival
Hierarchy non-exclusive)
Participation High High neutral
level (in the Medium Medium
Specificity of
definition of the
Low Low
goal)
Identification High
High
with Low Private good
Clarity level Hierarchical
Required Highly specific
Low
skills Trivial/Common
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8. The multidimensional matrix in
practice: the task of annotation on
Flickr
Social Nature of good
Goal Tasks
Structure being produced
Communication High High
level (about the Medium Variety of Medium
goal of the tasks) Low Low
Hierarchy
Participation High High Public good
neutral
level (in the Medium Medium
Specificity of
definition of the
Low Low
goal)
Identification High
High
with Low Private good
Clarity level Hierarchical
Required Highly specific
Low
skills Trivial/Common
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9. 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
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10. 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
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11. 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
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12. Telefonica case study
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13. Enterprise Knowledge
Management at Telefónica
• Services of the intranet
portal • Semantic solutions for
Document management
–
enterprise knowledge
Corporate directories
–
Pilot/Product/Service catalogues
management enhance
how
–
– News
– Bank of ideas
– Existing content and
knowledge are used and
– Blogs, wikis, forums exploited (sometimes in
– Search engines novel, unexpected ways)
• Metrics – Employees collaborate and
– 1200 employees in 7 cities and 3
interact within the team
and with customers
countries (↑)
– ˜3050 visits per day, ˜56000 page
views (impressions) per day,
average visit time: 20’

14. 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
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15. The multidimensional matrix for
Telefonica: the environment
Nature of good
Goal Tasks Social Structure
being produced
Communication High High
level (about the Medium Medium
Variety of
goal of the
tasks) Low Low
Hierarchy neutral Public good
Participation High High
level (in the Medium Medium
Specificity of
definition of the
goal) Low Low
Identification High
High
with Low Private good
Clarity level Hierarchical
Highly specific
Low Required skills
Trivial/Common
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16. 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)
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17. The Mechanism design exercise in
our case study (II)
• 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
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18. 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
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19. 1° level of incentives for Telefonica
(II)
• Everyone (even employees ;-) ) like to play and to compete
• ... and win prizes in return

20. 1° level of incentives for Telefonica
(III)
• Making everyday‘s tasks more fun

21. 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)
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22. 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
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23. 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.

24. 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
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25. Why do you need this?
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26. 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
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28. 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
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29. 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.

30. Summing up
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31. 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
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