“Social”, “Open” and “Participative”? Exploring Personal Experiences and Organisational Effects of Enterprise2.0 Use

Abstract

Organisations are increasingly adopting Web2.0 technologies such as web-based communities, social networking sites, wikis and blogs to enable users to interact, share information and alter web-based content. In a business/commercial context, the use of such technologies has been termed Enterprise2.0. This paper explores organisational actors' experiences of this new technology and how the shift to Enterprise2.0 is shaping how people work and organise. We present an in-depth case study of a large multinational telecommunications company that is commonly regarded as one of the leading proponents of Enterprise2.0. Data were collected from three business units each exhibiting different characteristics in terms of the level of Enterprise2.0 experience and employee participation in decision-making. Our findings show that while Enterprise2.0 is claimed to be "social", "open" and "participative" and has the potential to deliver significant business benefits, the experiences of organisational actors suggest that their expectations regarding Enterprise2.0 use were not met. Paradoxically, employee participation was limited and the monitoring and moderation of certain discussions, together with political use of the technology by leaders, meant that the use of Enterprise2.0 was often thought of as no more "social", "open" or "participative" than more traditional methods of communication. These results are discussed within the framework of previous research on the management of the introduction of new technology and its use and exploitation within organisations.

Social Media as a Mechanism for Engagement?

“…These data were collected as part of a larger study into the impact of social media (see Denyer, Parry, & Flowers, 2011). In order to allow us to investigate the effectiveness of social media technology for communicating and engaging with employees, 33 semi-structured interviews with individual respondents were undertaken.…”

Moderation of Enterprise Social Networks _ A Literature Review from a Corporate Perspective

“…They described the need for "careful" policing in combination with ESN user education in order to foster persistent UGC. This policing and guideline theme is visible in other articles [17,28,33,38,53,63,64,70] but is different from the corporate supervision perspective with the education theme being in the focus, rather than the compliance character. This user education is primary associated with a corporate engagement in communicating, training and show casing the wanted ESN use, with top-management taking the active ESN user role model in [13,26,28,34,70].…”

“…The loss of control over the information flow or shift in power relation is concerning several researches in their discussion parts [5,6,17,19,51,66]. One could think that enterprises will be very cautious with implementing those tools but "executives and managers attempt to leverage the power of the informal information economies of their companies" [38, p.…”

“…x [14] x [15] x [17] x [19] x [21] x [23] x [26] x [28] x [31] (x) x (x) [32] x [33] x [34] x [38] x [39] x [45] (x) [50] x [53] x [54] (x) [55] (x) (x) [57] (x) (x) [62] x [63] (x) (x) [64] (x) (x) [68] x [70] x (x) not soley in favor 3 5 6 x in favor 4 17 3 the narrative put one approach in the foreground, we could still gain useful insights about another approach. Consequently, one article might be assigned to two approaches and if one approach is clearly favored "x" is used as an indicator.…”

“…As a consequence of such high organizational attention, this young and evolving IS research field is recognized as an important part of the whole social media research stream [35]. Those web based social media technologies -micro-/blogs, social networking sites, wikis, communities to name a few [17,36,67] -are common in user features of profiles, relational connections and sharing/exploring [8]. ESN services can be separated in intra-organizational platforms restricted to an employee's audience or in the use of social media platforms for external party interaction [59].…”