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Web analytics tools are now in operation for about 15 years. While primarily developed to support the operators of public commercial web sites, they offer a stable and mature set of general features to track the behavior of users of arbitrary web based systems. Independently, in recent years web based social software is increasingly used to support collaboration and knowledge exchange in modern enterprises. This paper examines how enterprise social software can benefit from the features provided by state of the art web analytics solutions.In the first part of the paper, we give an overview of the most common capabilities of commercial and open source web analytics tools and examine how the data they produce can be accessed and utilized by other applications. Subsequently, illustrating how social software users - be it as authors or consumers of content -, site operators and even the software developers can profit from this integration. To demonstrate the general feasibility of the approach, we then describe how one scenario was implemented in a commercial web based enterprise collaboration platform using an open source web analytics tool. The current popularity of individual documents, like wiki pages or blog posts, was measured using the number of recent visits for the respective web pages. The resulting metric was then used to improve the document scoring mechanism of the platform's search component. Finally we show that the web analytics tool can in turn be used to track precisely how the search functionality is used - and thus allows for an assessment of the effectiveness of the abovementioned improvement. It further enables a qualitative analysis of user behavior that helps to find defects in the software and additionally motivates further refinements and enhancements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technology surveillance (TS) can be seen as a particular branch of knowledge management (KM) primarily focusing on technology related information. It constitutes a systematic process including the activities of gathering, organizing, analyzing, and disseminating information from internal and external sources to assist organizations in managing risks in their operational and strategic environment. In this paper we focus on TS in a university environment where different departments, research groups and individual researchers critically depend on up-to-date technology-related information in their field. Today, the actors in the TS process are challenged with an exponential growth of scientific knowledge and technology related information. However, the fact that all of this information is available in digital formats and the trend that it is increasingly available free of charge or at low prices offers many new opportunities. We suggest an approach for TS that helps universities to seize these opportunities and to master the challenges using proven Web 2.0 technologies. We first describe the goals, activities and roles of traditional TS approaches together with typical problems that are encountered when the activities are performed in practice, particularly in a research context. Then, after shortly introducing the most important Web 2.0 technologies and their application in enterprises and organizations, a theoretical model of a Web 2.0 supported TS process is developed. Subsequently, we demonstrate how this approach can be applied in practice using an existing commercial web based collaboration platform. We show by an example scenario how the offered integrated structuring capabilities, access rights management, linking and tagging functionality can support the activities of the proposed model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technology surveillance (TS) can be seen as a particular branch of knowledge management (KM) primarily focusing on technology related information. It constitutes a systematic process including the activities of gathering, organizing, analyzing, and disseminating information from internal and external sources to assist organizations in managing risks in their operational and strategic environment. In this paper we focus on TS in a university environment where different departments, research groups and individual researchers critically depend on up-to-date technology-related information in their field. Today, the actors in the TS process are challenged with an exponential growth of scientific knowledge and technology related information. However, the fact that all of this information is available in digital formats and the trend that it is increasingly available free of charge or at low prices offers many new opportunities. We suggest an approach for TS that helps universities to seize these opportunities and to master the challenges using proven Web 2.0 technologies. We first describe the goals, activities and roles of traditional TS approaches together with typical problems that are encountered when the activities are performed in practice, particularly in a research context. Then, after shortly introducing the most important Web 2.0 technologies and their application in enterprises and organizations, a theoretical model of a Web 2.0 supported TS process is developed. Subsequently, we demonstrate how this approach can be applied in practice using an existing commercial web based collaboration platform. We show by an example scenario how the offered integrated structuring capabilities, access rights management, linking and tagging functionality can support the activities of the proposed model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]