Why Don’t You Use It? Assessing the Determinants of Enterprise Social Software Usage: A Conceptual Model Integrating Innovation Diffusion and Social Capital Theories

Social software has recently attracted the attention of organizations. Nowadays organizational social software applications are often bundled within enterprise social software platforms (ESSPs). Given the popularity of social software in the private realm (e.g., Facebook), organizations expect their employees to use the ESSPs in the same frequency right after rollout. However, employees do not always meet this expectation, leading to internal social software platforms that starve for attention. While there is some research investigating users’ motives to adopt social software in the private realm, empirical research on social software adoption in an enterprise setting is still scarce. As a step towards closing this research gap, we collected a rich set of qualitative data aiming at investigating the determinants of employees’ ESSP usage. Based on theory and the collected qualitative data, this paper proposes a conceptual ESSP adoption model combining the theoretical perspectives of innovation diffusion theory and social capital theory

Measuring the Impact of Organizational Social Web Site Usage on Work Performance: A Multilevel Model

This paper describes the development of a multilevel model for investigating the impact of organizational social web site (SWS) usage on individual and team performance. Despite the SWS focus on collective phenomena – such as crowd sourcing and collective intelligence – previous research on SWS usage in general does not investigate it as a multilevel phenomenon. Our paper addresses this gap by drawing on existing guidelines for multilevel theorizing. We thus propose that SWS usage impacts individual and team performance through its improved collaboration capabilities. Organizational learning and social capital theories serve as the theoretical foundation. Ultimately, we present a multilevel model as the foundation for future empirical research on SWS usage’s impact on individual and team performance. Our research’s contribution lies in the theoretical derivation of a multilevel model

Towards Assessing the Success of Social Software in Corporate Environments

Induced by the widespread use of social software in personal contexts, companies wish to profit from its advantages. Owing to limited IT budgets and the need to justify investments in such systems, it is important to assess the benefits of employing social software in the corporate context. In this paper, we propose conceptual models for assessing the success of two specific types of social software: wikis and weblogs. These conceptual models are based on the DeLone and McLean IS Success Model as well as on an extensive review of social software literature. The two resulting models form the foundation for future empirical work in this area

The Adoption of Web 2.0 in Corporations: A Process Perspective

Widely discussed in the media, Web 2.0 systems have drawn the attention of corporations, many of which now seek to adopt Web 2.0 technologies and transfer its benefits to their organizations. Organizations often struggle with the adoption of information systems, and Web 2.0 systems are certainly no exception. As an empirical foundation, we studied three organizations that successfully adopted Web 2.0 systems. We conducted a narrative analysis of the case study material to produce a process theory for Web 2.0 system adoption. Finally, we compare it to the enterprise system experience cycle of Markus and Tanis (2000). Our results indicate that the adoption of Web 2.0 systems differs from larger enterprise system adoption projects. This is rooted in the lower implementation and maintenance costs as well as lower technical complexity of Web 2.0 systems. Furthermore, its voluntary characteristics lead to an adoption process that focuses mainly on convincing users of its benefits

Observing the Evolution of the Universe

How did the universe evolve? The fine angular scale (l>1000) temperature and polarization anisotropies in the CMB are a Rosetta stone for understanding the evolution of the universe. Through detailed measurements one may address everything from the physics of the birth of the universe to the history of star formation and the process by which galaxies formed. One may in addition track the evolution of the dark energy and discover the net neutrino mass. We are at the dawn of a new era in which hundreds of square degrees of sky can be mapped with arcminute resolution and sensitivities measured in microKelvin. Acquiring these data requires the use of special purpose telescopes such as the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), located in Chile, and the South Pole Telescope (SPT). These new telescopes are outfitted with a new generation of custom mm-wave kilo-pixel arrays. Additional instruments are in the planning stages.Comment: Science White Paper submitted to the US Astro2010 Decadal Survey. Full list of 177 author available at http://cmbpol.uchicago.ed

CONCEPTUALIZING A VERY RICH USAGE CONSTRUCT TO MEASURE THE IMPACT OF ORGANIZATIONAL SOCIAL WEB SITE USAGE ON INDIVIDUAL PERFORMANCE

This paper describes a conceptual model investigating the impact of organizational social web site (SWS) usage on individual performance. Previous research on SWS usage offers rather lean measures, which do not account for the context (i.e. the task the system is used for). We address this research gap by constructing a very rich usage measure and introducing it in the context of organizational SWS usage. We propose that the elements of SWS usage, namely user, system, and task, impact individual performance through two forms of organizational learning – exploration and exploitation – as well as through user cognitions during usage. We further present a conceptual model as the foundation for future empirical research on the impact of SWS usage on individual performance. The theoretical contribution lies in constructing a very rich system usage construct and the resulting conceptual model. Our contribution to practice is providing an instrument to measure organizational SWS usage and its performance impact

The Origin of the Universe as Revealed Through the Polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background

Modern cosmology has sharpened questions posed for millennia about the origin of our cosmic habitat. The age-old questions have been transformed into two pressing issues primed for attack in the coming decade: How did the Universe begin? and What physical laws govern the Universe at the highest energies? The clearest window onto these questions is the pattern of polarization in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), which is uniquely sensitive to primordial gravity waves. A detection of the special pattern produced by gravity waves would be not only an unprecedented discovery, but also a direct probe of physics at the earliest observable instants of our Universe. Experiments which map CMB polarization over the coming decade will lead us on our first steps towards answering these age-old questions