Banking on Web 2.0 Approaches to Build a Sustainable Enterprise

This paper approaches the issue of sustainability in business in a less traditional manner by considering more than just the competitive advantage a company has to build in the rivalry with its competitors. Building enterprise sustainability requires a broader understanding of the interdependencies between the company and its human and natural environments. Effective stakeholder engagement is key and online openness and cooperation bring about new conditions for corporate social responsibility. The paper discusses the potential of the Web 2.0 tools for the interaction between the company and its stakeholders and the impact of those tools on the organizational culture in support of sustainability is analyzed. This is particularly relevant during the current economic crisis when most of the efforts go into cutting costs in order to survive.sustainable corporation; corporate social responsibility; organizational change; Web 2.0 culture; CSR 2.0.

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Integrating social software into course design and tracking student engagement : early results and research perspectives

The uptake of social software is becoming more widespread in many sectors of education and organizational development. However, there is little empirical research on the impacts of adopting these technologies, and so it is difficult to determine appropriate pedagogic models and whether or not the desired learning outcomes are being realized. This paper reports early findings of an ongoing pilot study which is based on the concept of collaborative learning and supported by means of social software. It describes the educational philosophy behind the study and the teaching techniques used. The application of various features of social software, including blogs, file management and personalization, are discussed, as well as the different techniques for facilitating and measuring the level of student engagement with social software. The results indicate that student engagement with social software can be shaped by course design and activities that integrate educational technology into the course structure

Continued Use Of Intra-Organizational Blogs: Impacts Of Habits, Network Externalities, And Ranking

Enterprise 2.0 applications, such as blogging systems, are increasingly prevailing in corporate contexts. As intra-organizational blogs are expected to provide a new approaching to building a flexible intra-organizational networking platform which could effectively facilitate knowledge sharing, it is worthwhile to address why and how the employees may accept a blogging system and keep blogging continually. Drawing upon the existing literature, this paper proposes a conceptual model which suggests that the continued use of internal blogging among employees is jointly driven by the forces of habituation and network externalities, while these forces can be shaped by managerial incentives such as a ranking mechanism. To empirically test the proposed model, actual usage data are collected from the internal blogging platform of a large Chinese company, so as to measure all the related constructs. Statistical results from a structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis illustrate that the model effectively explains the continued use of corporate internal blogging systems. By using the actual record data obtained from an in-practice system, our study manages to avoid the self-report bias which inevitably perplexes conventional survey-based research. We believe that the findings of this paper would contribute to the literature of Enterprise 2.0 user behavior on both theoretical and methodological perspectives, while providing helpful practical insights for better promoting the use of blogging systems in corporate contexts

Informal eCollaboration Channels: Shedding Light on “Shadow CIT”

There is some evidence of the unabated proliferation of employee-autonomous, informal in an enterprise sense, collaborative information technologies (CITs) to perform collaborative activities despite huge investments in CIT enterprise systems. This article will introduce the metaphorical construct of “shadow CIT” (similar to “shadow IT” – Raden, 2005; Schaffner, 2007) to describe the strategic choice to use autonomous CITs instead of formal enterprise CITs. “Shadow IT” has been defined by Raden (2005) as a set of IT tools used “for performing IT functions but not part of the mainstream IT organization” (p.1). Similarly, “shadow CIT” solutions are employee-autonomous: they are not implemented as part of the organisational IT infrastructure, neither have they received any targeted organisational investment. Several research questions are explored in this paper. The existence of “shadow IT” has been argued to imply a failure on the part of enterprise IT to provide all of the services to meet their users‟ needs. Does the existence of “shadow CIT” imply a failure of enterprise CITs of a similar kind? If shadow CITs are found to be [capable of] filling gaps within enterprise CITs, what kind of gaps are these? Often, without being able to articulate why, users appear to shun solutions and good architecture within enterprise CITs in favour of the ability to get their work done through autonomous “shadow” solutions. What kind of motivation may be driving such decisions

Foundations of Social Media Marketing

The Social Media have changed the power structures in the marketplace; evidence points to a major power migration taking place and to emergence of a new breed of powerful and sophisticated customer, difficult to influence, persuade and retain The paper outlines the nature, effects and present status of the Social Media, underlying their role as customer empowerment agents. It explains their aptitude and possible roles as part of the corporate Marketing strategy and identifies different ways of engaging them as marketing tools. The paper proposes two possible Social Media marketing strategies: a. The passive approach focusing on utilizing the Social Media domain as source of customer voice and market intelligence. b. The active approach i.e. engaging the Social Media as direct marketing and PR channels, as channels of customer influence, as tools of personalizing products and last but not least develop them as platforms of co-operation and customer-generated innovation. Finally the paper identifies future research directions around this new element of the marketing landscap