The Use of Social Media in Enterprises for Communication, Collaboration, and Knowledge Management

Der Erfolg von Social Media im Internet hat dazu geführt, dass diese Technologie zunehmend auch in Unternehmen eingesetzt, oder über deren Implementierung nachgedacht wird. Durch die erwartete Verbesserung der Kommunikation und Interaktion zwischen Mitarbeitern auf der einen Seite und des Wissensmanagements auf der anderen Seite er-hoffen sich Entscheidungsträger in Unternehmen einen erheblichen betriebswirtschaftlichen Nutzen. Obwohl es einige Beispiele erfolgreicher Enterprise-Social-Media(ESM)-Implementierungen gibt und mehr als 90% der Fortune 500 Unternehmen ESM eingeführt haben oder dies planen, verfehlen 80% der ESM-Projekte die eingangs definierten Ziele. Während die Entscheidung, die Software einzukaufen, zentral getroffen wird, hängt deren Erfolg von der aktiven Partizipation der Mitarbeiter ab – wie sich anhand der genannten Statistiken zeigt, ist beides nicht zwangsläufig korreliert. Im Gegensatz zu organischem Wachstum, wie es in Social-Media-Anwendungen im Internet in den vergangenen Jahren beobachtet werden konnte (z.B. bei Facebook), ist die Nutzungsrate von internen ESM oft zu gering, um den Fortbestand der Community zu sichern. Es zeigt sich dabei verstärkt, dass passive Roll-Out-Strategien, die darauf vertrauen, dass es ein vergleichbares organisches Wachstum auch bei ESM gibt, zum Scheitern verurteilt sind. Viel-mehr müssen Analysen im Vorhinein das für einen spezifischen Anwendungsbereich geeignete Tool identifizieren, und Strategien entwickelt werden, wie Mitarbeiter für die Interaktion über die neuen Anwendungen gewonnen werden können. Da Ausgaben für Informationstechnologien bei einem geringen Nutzungsgrad nicht zu-rechtfertigen sind, trägt die vorliegende Dissertation in acht Essays dazu bei, verschiedene Facetten der ESM-Nutzung näher beleuchten und so zu einem besseren Verständnis des Themas und damit einhergehend einer effektiveren und effizienteren Implementierung von ESM beitragen. Sowohl die Analyse von Einflussfaktoren auf verschiedene Nutzungstypen von ESM, die Optimierung von Enterprise-Suchalgorithmen als auch die Neuinterpretation von Online-Produkt-Ratings können dabei helfen, die Veränderungen der internen und externen Kommunikation, Kollaboration und des Wissensmanagements, die sich durch den Einsatz von ESM ergeben, besser zu erklären und bedarfs-gerechter einzusetzen. Die theoretischen und praktischen Implikationen, welche sich konkret aus den einzelnen Essays ergeben, werden in den entsprechenden Abschnitten der jeweiligen Papiere erläutert

Essays on enterprise social media: moderation, shop floor integration and information system induced organizational change

The digital transformation increases the pressure on innovation capabilities and challenges organizations to adapt their business models. In order to cope with the increased competitiveness, organizations face two significant internal challenges: Enabling internal digital collaboration and knowledge sharing as well as information system-induced change. This dissertation will investigate seven related research questions divided in two main parts. The first part focuses on how an organization can foster digital knowledge exchanges and collaboration in global organizations. Enterprise social media has attracted the attention of organizations as a technology for social collaboration and knowledge sharing. The dissertation will investigate how organizations can moderate the employee discourse in such platforms from a novel organizational perspective and provide insights on how to increase the encouragement for employees to contribute and assure content quality. The developed framework will provide detailed moderation approaches. In addition, the risk of privacy concerns associated with organizational interference in the new digital collaboration technologies are evaluated. The second part of the dissertation shifts the focus to the shop floor environment, an area that has faced substantial digital advancements. Those advancements change the organizational role of the shop floor to a more knowledge work-oriented environment. Firstly, a state of research regarding technology acceptance and professional diversity is presented to create an enterprise social media job-characteristic framework. Further, a unique and longitudinal shop floor case study is investigated to derive organizational challenges for enterprise social media and potentials for empowerment. To validate the future shop floor environment needs use cases for the shop floor are derived and a user profile is established. The case study is extended by expert interviews to focus on conceptualizing organizational information systems-induced change. In this regard, the role of work practices, organizational and employee mindset and information system change are integrated into a holistic organizational change model that targets employee empowerment. This dissertation provides a comprehensive overview of enterprise social media from an organizational management and shop floor perspective. It contributes to understanding new digital needs at the shop floor and the information systems-induced change journey towards digital employee empowerment

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

Evaluating the use and impact of Web 2.0 technologies in local government

Second generation web-based technologies (Web 2.0) such as social media and networking sites are increasingly being used by governments for activities ranging from open policy making to communication campaigns and customer service. However, this in turn has brought about additional challenges. By its very nature, Web 2.0 tech- nologies are more interactive than the traditional models of information provision or creation of digital services. Such technologies open up a new set of benefits, costs and risks to those government authorities who make use of these social and digital media to enhance their work. This study draws on the extant literature together with an in-depth qualitative case enquiry to propose an emergent framework for evaluating the intra-organisational use of Web 2.0 technologies and its impact on local government. The study findings identified additional four factors (i.e. benefits: intra-marketing, informal engagement, costs: workload constraints and risk: integration with other systems) as part of the evaluation criteria which have not previously been discussed in the existing literature surrounding the context of Web 2.0 use in local government. The study concludes that a combined analysis of the evaluation and impact assessment factors, rather than one particular approach would better assist decision makers when implementing Web 2.0 technologies for use by public administration employees

Teacher competence development – a European perspective

This chapter provides an European perspectives on teacher competence development

Community-based mentoring and innovating through Web 2.0

The rise of social software, often termed Web 2.0, has resulted in heightened awareness of the opportunities for creative and innovative approaches to learning that are afforded by network technologies. Social software platforms and social networking technologies have become part of the learning landscape both for those who learn formally within institutions, and for those who learn informally via emergent web-based learning communities. As collaborative online learning becomes a reality, new skills in communication and collaboration are required in order to use new technologies effectively, develop real digital literacy and other 21st century skills

Enterprise social networks as digital infrastructures - understanding the utilitarian value of social media at the workplace

In this study, we first show that while both the perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment of enterprise social networks impact employees’ intentions for continuous participation, the utilitarian value significantly outpaces its hedonic value. Second, we prove that the network’s utilitarian value is constituted by its digital infrastructure characteristics: versatility, adaptability, interconnectedness and invisibility-in-use. The study is set within a software engineering company and bases on quantitative survey research, applying partial least squares structural equation modeling

Collaborative authoring and the virtual problem of context in writing courses

Since the 1980s, the field of rhetoric and composition has embraced the idea of collaborative writing as a means of generating new knowledge, troubling traditional conceptions of the author, and repositioning power within the student-teacher hierarchy. Authors such as David Bleich, Kenneth Bruffee, and Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede have written about, and advocated for, teachers' engagement with collaboration in the composition classroom. Yet in discussions of collaborative writing, scholars have tended to ignore an important element: the limitations placed upon student agency by the institutional context in which students write. We can ask students to work together in the classroom, but limitations on their choice of collaborators, their time together, and their ability to determine the outcome of their work result in an unproductive simulacrum of collaboration in which students write together but do not engage deeply with each other in the ways scholars describe. Ignoring the fact that classroom collaborative writing is embedded in different fields of power than writing done by scholars working outside institutional limitations results in a conception of collaborative writing as little more than an element of pedagogy, one that can be added to a syllabus without significantly changing the structure, goals, or ideology of the course. Rather than approaching collaborative writing as a means of pushing against the limits of institutional writing, the context in which collaboration takes place is naturalized. As a result, the assessment and disciplinary structures of the academy, the physical division of the student body into class sections, and the tools available to support (or undercut) collaborative work vanish in the scholarship. To counter this trend, I explore how the denial of context and the resulting disconnection between theory (the claims for collaborative writing) and practice (the twenty-first-century composition classroom) promote not collaboration, but a simulacrum of collaboration: academic work that mimics the appearance of true collaboration while failing to enact the liberatory possibility of working with other writers. This project explores collaborative theory on three levels: the personal, in which collaborative writing is illustrated via specific business, public, and academic contexts; the pedagogical, in which current collaborative theory and practice is deployed and analyzed to understand its limitations; and the disciplinary, in which current collaborative theory and practice is questioned, critiqued, and remediated to propose an alternative collaborative classroom praxis. The structure of the dissertation, which uses interchapters to draw connections between larger theoretical issues and my ethnographic research, interviews, and analysis, reflects these three strands as a means of illustrating the interdependence of the personal, pedagogical, and disciplinary conceptions of and engagements with collaborative writing