KNOWLEDGE SHARING AND COLLABORATION THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA - THE CASE OF IBM

Intellectual capital is the single most important asset owned by any organization. Business continuity, innovation, and long-term sustainability of Small Medium Enterprises depend partly on accumulated organizational knowledge. Knowledge is hard to capture and manage due to its implicit nature. This paper seeks to investigate how Web 2.0 technologies are being used to overcome knowledge sharing and collaboration issues. The new web technologies, which are based on platforms, are referred to as emergent social software platforms (ESSP’s). The use of ESSP’s within a business enterprise to achieve business goals is known as enterprise 2.0 (E2.0). Central to this research is the proposed knowledge sharing cycle model, which has three main stages - internalization, externalization, and objectification. This model is adapted based on the findings of a case study of IBM Corporation. The findings indicate that ESSP’s can be used to support knowledge sharing practices and to help convert knowledge into its different forms

Social Media As Management Fashion - A Discourse Perspective

Social media platforms and services have rapidly grown into an important societal phenomenon, lately also with increased impact on business. The relative novelty of its occurrence in a business context, the lack of well-grounded best practice and the scarcity of research, result in organizational decision-makers having to rely on vendor descriptions and trade press articles to make sense of social media. By using management fashion theory and discourse analysis, we examine how a management fashion discourse on social media unfolds and enacts social media as a disruptive force that managers must consider in the form of e.g. strategies, normative guidelines and policies. Our analysis shows that social media discourse differs somewhat from how previous IT fashions have developed, primarily due to the fact that social media discourse is propelled by forces outside the company. We analyze the discourse constructs identified in the data using management fashion theory and position social media discourse as a particular form of management fashion. The ‘problem discourse’ defines hinders towards strategic development of social media and the reasons for their existence, which provides an agenda for change. The ‘solution discourse’ theorizes social media as a business case and provides arguments for how managers should organize internally to meet the new demands. The ‘bandwagon discourse’ provides role models, policies and codes of conduct for a successful dissemination of social media into the organization

The Value of Social Media: What Social Networking Sites Afford Organizations

Social media are a phenomenon that has quickly become deeply rooted in the mechanics of our everyday lives, dramatically changing how we interact and collaborate with family, peers, and society. Meanwhile, organizations have increasingly been exposed to and affected by this societal use, and hence been nudged into also adopting social media platforms. Since few academic studies have examined what this change will mean to organizations, I aim to contribute a deeper qualitative understanding of the topic. The empirical foundation comprises six separate studies that together cast light the value of social media bring to today’s organizations. The thesis contributes both empirically and theoretically to research into the organizational use of social media. The constituent papers of this thesis can be seen as offering different perspectives on the potential value of social media, and what social networking sites (SNSs) afford organizations. Together, they contribute to an improved understanding of the roles and structure of social media, and of how SNSs create and share knowledge and thereby influence innovation. In the last decade, the rapid development of social media and their growing importance in both industry and society at large have spurred interest among both academics and practitioners, an interest that is likely to continue to grow. It is therefore important that the value of social media for organizational use, has not yet been fully explored, receives more attention, so organizational efforts and investments in social media often lack suitable guidance and strategies. This dissertation is designed to mitigate these challenges

Social Networking Sites, Innovation and the Patient as Peer - The Case of PatientsLikeMe

Social Networking Sites (SNS) have started to shift from being used primarily for leisure and fun to have more serious purposes. One such more serious area is health and medicine, where lately several disease-specific communities of interest have established a presence on SNSs. In this exploratory paper, we study a health-related SNS called PatientsLikeMe, by using secondary, web-based qualitative data. By applying Benkler’s notion of Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP) we approach PatientsLikeMe as an online participatory innovation platform in the realm of community based, open, distributed and collaborative innovation. We discuss how the features of social networking sites interplay with peer production in order to facilitate innovation. The paper contributes to the theory of CBPP by analyzing the different characteristics of PatientsLikeMe in relation to other examples from the literature