CHI - Team analytics

Team Analytics: Understanding Teams in the Global Workplace
By Jan Pieper, Julia Grace, and Stephen Dill (IBM Almaden Research)

Comments: Daniel Gruben , William Hodges

Summary:
The article serves as an introduction to the application, Team Analytics and its use within an email client. Also, a small user survey is performed on the application. The software organizes the contact information for a team to improve communication and team building. To use Team Analytics, the user enters a list of email addresses and then the software creates the following items: picture gallery, organizational chart, timezone pain chart, attribute pie chart, and a bizcard section. The application was placed into action in 2008 at a large global company, it still serves about 5,000 requests per week.
User Survey
An anonymous survey was provided to existing users and had 290 self-selected respondents. Thus study showed that the majority use Team Analytics on a weekly basis and over 90% are very satisfied with the software.
Discussion:
By today's global economy, the application could be useful in staying in good contact with your team. From my experience, it can be challenging to stay on the same page with a local team, I can imagine the difficulty for a virtual team divided amongst time zones. Thus, I would think the timezone pain chart would be a useful aspect in scheduling meetings even though it received a poor rating in the survey.