In a recent survey of 193 Yammer users my colleague Matti Mäntymäki and I investigated which forms of usage drive perceived individual value in ESN. The study was based on prior case studies I had carried out with various other colleagues in which we identified five major use cases of ESN: the ways in which Yammer was mainly used within the workplace.

These five use cases are: 1) Discussions and informal talk (people discuss various matters of interest), 2) Status updates and event notifications (people tell each other what they are working on and about events in their work environment), 3) Idea and input generation (people post links to interesting information and brainstorm new ideas), 4) Problem-solving (people crowdsource solutions to pressing work problems), and 5) Social feedback (people share success stories and praise each other).

While these studies have shown that all of these use cases contribute to the shared value for the organisation, these cases were all based on the analysis of Yammer messages – what those people do that actively post to the Yammer space.

But what about the silent majority of passive users (note: don’t call them lurkers – they’re not)? So in this study we wanted to know, what makes Yammer valuable more generally for all users?

We went through a multi-stage process to rigorously develop and operationalise constructs and an ensuing questionnaire instrument, which we distributed to Yammer users across three organisations.

The results

Our results (see figure below) show that exchanging and obtaining ideas and information is by far the most important source of value for ESN users. Users see ESN as a space for sharing information with other users, for discussing ideas and for reading and obtaining information that feed into the users’ work processes. This speaks to the usefulness of ESN in the context of knowledge work and for knowledge exchange.

Moreover, users also perceive problem-solving and updates & events as valuable, yet to a lesser extent. The other two constructs were non-significant.

But does that mean that informal discussions and the social aspects of ESN communication are useless and should be avoided? Of course not, it only means that when asked directly, users find value mostly in the information sharing aspects of ESN. The social aspects however are necessary because they underpin the ESN community, without which there wouldn’t be a useful space for information sharing to begin with.

Reference

Riemer K and Mantymaki M 2014 ‘Information, Ideas and Input: The Value of Enterprise Social Networks’, Proceedings of the 25th Australasian Conference of Information Systems ACIS 2014, Auckland, New Zealand, 10th December 2014 – Download full paper

In a recent study we looked into the ways in which users gain influence in Enterprise Social Networks: Is it through their position in the organisational hierarchy (formal influence) or by way of being an active contributor to the network (informal influence)?

We measured influence through the ability to garner responses to one’s messages posted into the network. In other words, does my ability to convince others in the network to reply to my messages depend on what my formal role is or does it depend on whether or not I am an active contributor myself.

Study approach

For this study we had access to the ESN data of Deloitte Australia, who were also able to provide data on the formal role and hierarchy position of about 65% of their users. All data was anonymous; users where only identified through an ID.

We operationalised three separate dependent variables: reply received yes/no, number of replies received, and time lag until first reply received.

We then hypothesized that 1) the higher one’s position, the more elikely they are to receive a reply, the more likely they are to receive more replies, and faster. 2) The same hypotheses were formulated for activity: The more active someone is in the network, the more likely they are to receive more replies, and faster.

After statistical testing, our results confirm both forms of influence. Interestingly however, the informal influence of communication activity is the much stronger effect. 

Hierarchy in ESN matters – but not much

On average, a user’s hierarchical level has a statistically significant influence, but this influence is so small that it does not to matter in day-to-day practice. For example, a user who outranks another user by one level in the hierarchy is able to elicit on average 1% more responses.

Interestingly, messages from users in higher positions elicit slightly slower responses on average. We reason that people might need more time to formulate an adequate answer or take more care in editing replies to users in higher positions. The reason might be the perceived social distance between sender and receiver.

Being active matters most

The strongest finding from our study is that a user’s communication behaviour has a much stronger effect on response behaviour than their hierarchical position. Our findings thus confirm the long-standing argument put forward by proponents of ESN that the social networks that emerge on ESN platforms can lead to a re-balancing of influence in organisations – away from formal hierarchy toward recognising user contributions.

In other words, people who have something to contribute will be recognised by the organisational community and be able to derive influence from their standing in the community, even if they do not sit in high-level hierarchical positions.

At the same time, our findings show that formal hierarchy does not lose its influence entirely, as both formal and informal hierarchy show up in our data. We also need to point out that the results operate on averages, it does not mean that single individuals will not derive significant ESN influence from their position on the org chart.

Yet, being the first of its kind, our study demonstrates that prolific knowledge workers might benefit from their contributions to and investment into the ESN, because they are able to draw on the network for contributions, not having to rely merely on information flows along the organisational hierarchy. We are conducting further research to unpack these effects with more detailed analyses. I will post more results in due course.

Reference

Stieglitz S, Riemer K and Meske C 2014 ‘Hierarchy or
Activity? The Role of Formal and Informal Influence in Eliciting
Responses From Enterprise Social Networks’, Proceedings of the 22nd European Conference on Information Systems ECIS, Tel Aviv, Israel, 11th June 2014. Download the paper.

We now have our long-overdue cost-benefit analysis for the NBN.

The current government and many in the business community have long asked how an infrastructure project such as the NBN could possibly have been launched without a thorough cost-benefit analysis – common sense, really.

The analysis, commissioned by Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull, has found the cheaper mixed-technology model (MTM) proposed by the government emerges as the cost-effective winner. 

The former government’s Fibre-to-the-Premise (FTTP) model was found to deliver essentially the same benefits at much higher cost and later, and has subsequently been decried as the result of technological romanticism and reckless spending. Again, common sense, many people would say.

And so we move on and miss a crucial opportunity to unlock the next wave of technological innovation, all because of a fundamental lack of understanding of the nature of infrastructure technologies, and because of common sense.

Drop your tools

Unfortunately, common sense is not always a good adviser. The organisational theorist Karl Weick famously called on the management community to “Drop your tools!” in order to effectively deal with unforeseen situations.

My point is that our established management tools, such as business plans and cost-benefit analyses, might well work for decisions about everyday technology that provide incremental change, but they fail when applied to potentially game-changing infrastructure technology.

According to Weick the problem is that these management tools are “tools of rationality” that “presume that the world is stable, knowable, and predictable.” But the world is not stable and the role of an infrastructure technology such as FTTP is precisely to unlock innovation and bring about change.

It is inherently impossible to undertake a cost-benefit analysis in any credible way that will do justice to such technologies. The problem is that, while we are well able to extrapolate the cost of building the NBN, the benefits it will unlock are fundamentally unknowable and unpredictable.

Think about it. The current analysis purports to envision cost and benefits until the year 2040. Now think back 25 years to 1989, to what was the pre-world wide web era, would we have been able to predict in any way how the internet and all the services and products that were built on top of it would have enabled the world we live in today? Just 8 years back, could anyone have been able to predict how the iPhone’s touch screen platform would unlock the current spur in technological innovation? If the answer to both is no, we have the answer to the question of whether the current analysis can in any credible way predict the benefits of FTTP.

One might object that the above technologies were not built by governments but by the business community. Correct, but irrelevant. The issue is that FTTP would not be built by the business community, because of an inherent “chicken and egg” problem: Users will only demand FTTP if there are services using it, but it will only be economical to build such services once a large enough installed base of FTTP exists.

We need Imagination, not Rationality

The problem in making decisions about game-changing technology is that our economic tools are tools of rationality, not imagination. They predict the future on the basis of our past. They are thus always biased towards the more conservative solution.

This is evident in the way the promises of the NBN are typically discussed in both the report and the wider debate: mostly in terms of higher download speeds with associated benefits for industries such as media and entertainment. Both MTM and FTTP will provide higher download speeds. But the promise of FTTP lies in the way it is able to provide each user with the same high upload as download speeds. While the report outlines quite well the much higher upload speed, it does not explicitly discriminate its analysis in this way. This is not surprising, because we have no way of knowing what users and small businesses might possibly do with such upload speeds. And so it is not part of the conversation. But that is precisely the point – we have no way of knowing.

Yet, we might begin to imagine far reaching innovations in health and education, new ways of organising work and changes to the ways we live, with flow-on changes to the make-up of our suburbs, and maybe even ways to relieve our congested city centres. Yet, not surprisingly, the current analysis comes to the conclusion that the benefits for health and education “will probably be extremely limited” as these sectors do not require much higher download speeds to deliver their services. Again, common sense, but missing the point.

There was much wrong with Labor’s NBN, such as the political nature of picking electorates for roll-out, blunders in setting up NBN Co and the failure to sell its ideas convincingly, but it wasn’t the lack of a cost-benefit analysis or the choice of technology.

We need to drop our tools and start imagining, rather than extrapolating. True innovation has always been a product of romanticism, not rationality.

 

What is gamification? Why is it used?

This is a blog post that I wanted to write for quite a while now to express my uneasiness with the idea of gamification in the workplace. I will outline why I think work gamification won’t work beyond the short-term and why it is an ethically and economically questionable approach.

Gamification has been a topic of interest for quite a while now. Gamification refers to “the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts to engage users in solving problems”. Typical game mechanics are scores that are earned for mastering certain activities, badges, so-called level-ups and finally a scoreboard, often to rank players.

Gamification rests on the observation that most people like playing games, and that people become truly immersed and engaged and won’t mind spending time doing so. This has led to the belief that it is part of human nature, that people are intrinsicly motivated to play games and that this motivation can be drawn on to engage people in other contexts as well.

‘The opportunities for gamification are everywhere, and everyone is a gamer – it’s part of human nature. By applying these tactics, you can employ subtle psychological responses that will keep your customers paying and engaging.” Fast Company 5th March 2014

Gamification is widely used in many different contexts. For example,

• In education so-called serious games are used to immerse the learner in a situational experience to get an educational point across. For example, the beergame lets players experuence first-hand the effects of systems dynamics.
• In advertising game mechanics are used to entice people to share marketing messages to create viral messaging effects.
• In health policy gamification is experimented with to break people’s habits to combat smoking or obesity.
• In scientific research, gamification is used to engage large crowds to solve large-scale problems.

Why gamification in the workplace?

The reason for taking gamification into the workplace is simple: Many people in modern workplaces are said to be disengaged (studies show numbers as high as 70%), and gamification has proven to be successful in engaging people in contexts such as the ones listed above. Disengagement negatively impacts on business productivity. More concretely, people are often unwilling to carry out certain tasks, such as data entry into business software, which results in a lack of data quality.

Against this background, gamification looks like an appealing solution. If we were able to turn work that has proven to be disengaging into a game we could thus appeal to people’s intrinsic game-play motivation. The result would be to re-engage people and to get them to carry out those menial tasks that now feel less like boring work and more like a game. Through earning points, badges and level-ups and through the appearance in public scoreboards people would gain recognition and would thus be motivated and more engaged in their work again. This is the argument in simple terms.

What is the problem then?

On the one hand, we have disengaged people; on the other hand, we have a method that engages people. This looks like a perfect match, doesn’t it?

It does, but it isn’t!

Here are four points why I think it is a bad idea. I will elaborate each of these below:

1. Gamification is a short-term concept.
2. Gamification addressed the symptoms of a broken system, but does nothing to fix it.
3. Gamification is disrespectful of employees.
4. Gamification only looks good on a simplistic understanding of human activity.

Gamification is a short-term concept

Gamification is a short-term concept. First, it is in the nature of most games that they have some end point. Second, most games lose their appeal after a while (it is only fun for a while to earn that next badge). Finally, the usage of scoreboards exhausts itself fairly quickly. Once the first positions on the board are taken, what is there to compete for for the rest of the game population?

This last point raises another issue. Games are typically competitive; individuals compete for recognition. While gamification works well in certain short-term or one-off activities such as campaign management, in the early stages of community building or even in graduate recruiting, the question arises if the short-term and competitive nature is congruent with building sustainable work systems.

Gamification only treats the symptoms of a broken system

The main problem with using gamification to engage people at work is that it only treats the symptoms of a system that is broken at a deeper level. Shouldn’t we rather ask why so many people are disengaged at work?

Very often, people are disengaged because they can’t see the point of what they are doing, the purpose of their tasks in the greater whole of the work system. Yet, if people can’t see the purpose of their work, then this is the actual problem, disengagement is merely the consequence.

Unfortunately, this is a common disease in many work systems that are designed to follow strict efficiency criteria. The wide-spread and often top-down application of business process re-engineering methods has led to the creation of structured business processes with atomistic tasks that come with clear rules for execution. Yet, such work systems, designed for efficiency, come with unfortunate by-products. Besides an in-built lack of flexibility, the most notable one is that people are degraded to task bearers, to cogs in a well-oiled machine. In such a system it is not important, not possible, and indeed often not wanted, that the individual task bearer gains too much overview of the entire process.

The flip-side however is that people become disenfranchised from the overall enterprise of the organisation. This is where the actual problem lies! If people can no longer see, understand and indeed buy into the greater purpose of the organisation, but are instead treated as labour-for-hire, disengagement is the logical result. I am of course painting a certain picture here, but all too often this is the reality in organisations and the reason for the high levels of disengaged employees. But when people become disenfranchised from work, no gamification will ultimately save the day.

This raises the question of why to use gamification at all, why not fix the underlying problem? First of all, the idea of gamification as a tool “to fix people” is well compatible with the ideology and values that created the structured work system in the first place. Second, fixing the system will be much harder, requires a rethinking of management approaches at a deeper level and requires genuine leadership, all of which is much harder to achieve than the quick-fix promise of engagement through gamification.

Gamification is disrespectful of employees

In applying gamification in the workplace there is a real danger that, even though it might achieve some intended benefits in the short term, it will actually worsen the situation in the long term.

Gamification, despite its intricate features and the game-like environment it creates, is a blunt instrument. Its aim is to change people’s behaviour through making them play games. But does this not amount to trickery? – “You don’t want to do this task, so I make you play a game in the course of which you will do it anyway?” Will people not see through this? And for people who are already disengaged and disenfranchised, will this not make them even more cynical about how they are treated by the organisation? Rather than being empowered and treated seriously as collaborators in a greater enterprise they are now turned into game players. In my view this raises important ethical questions regarding how gamification and the game design aims to exert agency over people through turning them into gamers.

Gamification rests on a narrow understanding of human nature

Gamification is often motivated using a philosophical argument, where gaming is located as an inherently human trait. Playing games is said to be part of human nature which apparently justifies its use in influencing people. After all, gamification only treats people as what they are anyway, game-players at heart. It must be ok then.

But what it actually assumes is that people have certain inherent traits (such as a propensity of gaming) and are bearers of certain behaviours (such as engaging in smoking or refusing to work). Two things are wrong with this view: First it treats people as individuals, when they are in fact social beings at base. Second, it adopts a narrow view of behaviour, as something belonging to the individual. While this view is all too prevalent in everyday thinking (and many academic disciplines), it has long been challenged.

It is well known that we are social beings, who strive for purpose in life. We assume multiple identities in different contexts. We are who we are through becoming part of different social practices. In short we are what we do and we draw our purpose in life from our practical involvement in various activities, at work and otherwise. And we spend much of our awake time at work!

When people care about and are invested in their work, when they draw a sense of purpose and identity form their work, when they understand themselves as part of a greater whole, gamification is not needed. Rather than trying to change people’s behaviour when they are reluctant to engage in tasks, the point of which is lost on them, organisations should ensure that people to draw a genuine sense of identity from their work. People are truly engaged when work is meaningful to them, when they can see the purpose of what they do in contributing to the overall purpose of the organisation.

Yet, this raises two more important points:

First, in many organisations this original purpose (e.g. to become a world-class full service airline) has already been lost and been replaced by a narrow and all too generic quest for profit or (worse even) cost reduction.

Second, while effective in increasing productivity and efficiency in stable environments, the top-down, structured work system (not least through disenfranchising people) poses a considerable risk when the organisation needs to change and become more responsive. Such responsiveness can only be truly achieved systemically, through the self-organising ability of the organisation. But this requires empowered employees who care about and understand the joint enterprise and can engage in the joint sense-making to reorient the organisation in the face of external change. Work gamification and the idea of the responsive organisation don’t gel.

As a keen observer of the Australian digital commerce space it strikes me that many of the issues and conversations that make headlines today, have been discussed in Europe about a decade ago.

A case in point is omnichannel retailing. Sure, it was called multichanneling at the time and it didn’t include the mobile channel (or not seriously, remember WAP?).

So, I went back to my old slide sets and discovered some useful slides that I had used with my colleague Carsten Totz in 2001 in a course on e-commerce at Muenster University. With some tweaking and updating they allowed me to create the following framework with models for implementing omnichannel strategies, which represent different stages of maturity.

Model 1: Channel choice

Under this model the retailer provides new online and mobile channels as largely separate offerings in addition to traditional store (or catalogue-based) retail.

While customers might use the channels interchangeably for information, under this model pricing and transactional aspects are managed independently. Some retailers also opt to set up separate entities that use their own branding.

Such strategies are often implemented in reaction to fears of cannibalization or push back from local franchisees, when the centre tries to implement an online strategy.

Model 2: Channel coordination

This model is more complex but also more customer-oriented, as the retailer allows customers to carry out different steps in the transaction process in different channels.

This allows “channel hopping”, whereby customers can buy online and pickup in the store, or use the store to try and buy, while the merchandise is delivered home.

Implementing such a strategy requires treating the online channel as an integral component of the retail strategy and data integration between the channels, which can be time-consuming and expensive depending on the nature of legacy systems.

Model 3: Channel blending

Channel blending aims to truly integrate channels. In fact, this model moves away from traditional “channel thinking”. It promotes rethinking the retail experience from the customer perspective. What might be treated as channels today will become components in an integrated customer retail experience design in the future.

The potential for this kind of innovation can be seen in Apple’s retail offering. Its online shop and iTunes-based fulfillment process are integral parts of the customer’s in-store experience.

The Apple Store App allows scanning of in-store items, which not only allows customers to see detailed information on a product, but also to pay and leave the store by presenting the receipt on the phone screen at the store exit.

Rethinking the role of mobile and online offerings opens up a creative space for retail innovation. In the future, traditional retail spaces might morph into showrooms for organizing product experiences, rather than being oriented – process and layout-wise – around the transaction process.

As a first step, mobile apps could be used to create in-store wish lists, share experiences with friends, organise lay-by and pay, while gradually allowing blended experiences, for instance, through avatar-based consultations or augmented reality solutions.

Omnichanneling in Australia is still in its infancy. This can best be seen by our large department stores recently reporting on the progress in creating their online offerings. While this provides stepping stones in creating a channel coordination model, the current status quo is years away from resembling a blended model.

In this talk, given at DISRUPT.SYDNEY on 5 September 2013, I contrast the dominant tool view of technology with what I term an infrastructure view. The dominant tool view treats technology as a solution for a problem. Technology has a distinct purpose and serves a need. My argument is that we quite naturally assume this view as it fits with the management orthodoxy of justifying investments through business cases. However, this narrow view of technology obscures the view of the enabling nature of technology in supporting uses that are fundamentally unknowable prior to making investment decisions. A tool view thus hinders innovating with technology as it results in conservative rather than forward-thinking decision.

Key to understanding the value and prospect of the Australian National Broadband Network (NBN) is to appreciate the nature of infrastructure technologies, which I have written about previously (e.g. see here).

The Sydney Morning Herald was kind enough to allow me to express some of these ideas in an opinion piece today.

In addition here is a short video in which I argue along those same lines:

As part of our latest study on Enterprise Social Networking we have looked into communication in groups. In our case study on Yammer at Deloitte Australia we have analysed communication in the thirteen most prolific groups, coded communication threads and carried out a cluster analysis to identify different types of groups. For the full analysis please download the full report.

We found four types of groups (see also figure below):

1. Conversational groups (‘virtual water coolers’) contain a large share of threads in which individuals come together and discuss a certain topic. Therefore, threads are slightly longer compared to the other group types. While a variety of topics are covered, most of them are in some way work-related or specific to the case organisation. We conclude that this archetype resembles a form of ‘virtual water cooler’, where people meet to discuss a broad range of topical work-related issues with intermissions of the occasional non-work related discussion.
2. Solution-oriented groups (‘innovation hot spots’) are characterised by lengthy conversations with a focus on problem-solving. Typically, users post a problem with related information and others reply, presenting their point of view of a possible solution or providing additional information that might be helpful. In addition users focus on innovation topics that are not directly related to the participants’ daily work, but due to the high interest in such topics, many people engage and provide new input, enabling to innovate on both internal processes or external markets and products.
3. People-centred crowdsourcing groups (‘networks of expertise’) have ‘Idea generation’ as a distinctive characteristic. While ideas are not always actually generated on Yammer, discussants often contribute contact details of colleagues for others to seek their expert advice. Overall, we perceived that the more complex the topic, less idea generation takes place on the platform, but is met with useful references to colleagues.
4. Information sharing groups (‘information streams’) are places for participants to share information of different kind, such as links to external web pages, figures, videos, animations and audio files. Participants post new and useful information for their colleagues. Content however is often not discussed or commented further, but sometimes enriched by context information.

Notably, all groups show a certain amount of information sharing. We assume that all group types tend to evolve from this initial archetype.

Reference

Riemer, K, Tavakoli, A (2013) The role of groups as local context in large Enterprise Social Networks: A Case Study of Yammer at Deloitte Australia, BIS Working Paper series BIS-WP2013-01.

We have recently published our latest study into Enterprise Social Networking, this time looking at how communication proliferates at the micro-level with a focus on the role of groups in large ESNs. While you can download the full report below, I wanted to share some of the findings here (more to come over the next days).

One thing we did in our study (which again is based on the Yammer network of Deloitte Australia) is compare communication threads in the ‘All network’ stream with those in a select number of well frequented groups in the network. The main outcome of this comparison is summarised in the following figure:

Download the full report here:

Riemer, K, Tavakoli, A (2013) The role of groups as local context in large Enterprise Social Networks: A Case Study of Yammer at Deloitte Australia, BIS Working Paper series BIS-WP2013-01.

In a guest piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, Slate writer Farhad Manjoo argues that “Apple needs to do more than just change the iPhone design“. Quite surprisingly he equates design narrowly with the aesthetics of the device, arguing that when Apple “hits a bump in the road, its instinct is to rejig how its products look”.

I would like to respond to what I think is a misunderstanding for the nature of design in general and the design of end user devices in particular.

1) The first and most obvious misunderstanding is to equate design with aesthetics, the cosmetic side of design (what the thing looks like). Apple, its chief designer Jon Ivy and Steve Jobs in his day have argued at numerous occasions that design is much more and runs much deeper than just the cosmetic surface of a product.

Good design imagines new devices in their (yet-to-be-created) use contexts. In essence, design is about changing the world. It is about imagining new practices and make these happen by creating devices that are radically usable. This is what Apple does best. Apple is in the business of changing our world – great devices are the means for doing it (and they make lots of money in the process, because they are good at it). This is what the iPhone and iPad have done, they have changed how we communicate, work, compose music, serve our clients, how we play games, review academic papers, you name it.

2) However, the more significant misunderstanding is that we (as people who enjoy dealing with technology) extrapolate our own relationship with technology to the user. While geeks, technology commentators and all those people whose business is technology per se will naturally see devices as things with features, users normally don’t! This is an important point and not a trivial one. We have written about this in more depth elsewhere.

In essence, for users when devices are fully adopted and work properly they move into the background, they withdraw from experience, they are not things to be manipulated but rather a transparent means for doing stuff. This does not mean that I cannot look at it as a thing, but for it to function most effectively it needs to get out of the way.

When I work on the computer and I am absorbed in writing a text, all hardware and software should just get out of the way, it should inconspicuously function and let me do what I am doing. When working at our best we are in automatic mode, our body deals with the device while we can concentrate on the task. This is why I enjoy my Mac, it gets out of the way, it does not intrude on my tasks in the same way Windows used to do. The same applies to the iPhone or iPad.

End user devices should just work and make themselves invisible whenever we are surfing the web, tweeting, doing our banking or whatever else we’re doing with these devices. The device and app should simply be invisible if everything goes well. Apple makes this its goal, and it achieves this quite well in my view (it is an extra perk that the thing really looks good if I choose to bring it into view and marvel at its slick aesthetics). We know that Apple does this quite well, because Apple users are much more active than Android users in any possible usage statistic available (they spend more time on their devices, buy more, browse the Internet more etc).

Good design withdraws from experience and lets me do my stuff.

Once we understand this phenomenon, we can see why any radical redesign of the iOS operating system at this point in time would really be a bad idea! As a geek, I would probably enjoy indulging in its newness, but as a user it would disrupt my flow. I would have to deal with the changes, I would have to re-learn. Users don’t want to learn devices, they want to use them. That is why evolutionary changes, step by step, improvements here and there, in easily digestible portions will just do the trick for most of us (users). No geek or tech commentator gets excited by this (they want new features, new UI, bold changes), but it works for the user. I am glad Apple understands this and keeps it that way.

When Apple wants to be bold they create a new device category, a new market, a new ecosystem, in short they change the world. But applying revolutionary changing to an already existing (and working!) ecosystem is really not a good idea.