Organization Science Winter Conference
NEW SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY allows organizations to increase innovation through improved internal communication, coordination and knowledge sharing. Social technologies turn previous information models on their heads, by placing the individual in the center and connecting knowledge and information to this individual, more than extracting solely explicit documentation produced by individuals. This represents an important advancement specifically with regards to overcoming one of the major challenges of the knowledge management tradition, namely the processing and managing of the transfer of tacit and implicit knowledge.
New social technologies in the workplace (Social business software: SBS) are natural offshoots of the traditional one-way-sender intranet, inspired by overall technological tendencies in society today, where 65% of adult internet users use a social networking site (like MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn). Only email and search engines are today used more frequently than social networking tools (Pew Internet Report, August 2011). Hence, it is likely to expect that SBS will soon be replacing today’s intranet solutions.
The successful implementation of SBS at the workplace is not without organizational challenges. It is therefore important to gain insights on the type of challenges that exist and how they can be avoided. Hence, we aim at identifying the central implementation challenges that organizations face when using SBS as an internal collaboration tool. We examine this through the use of multiple case study methodology in the context of a multinational knowledge intensive firm. In knowledge intensive firms employees’ specialized knowledge and competences is and the blend of such knowledge and competences are at the heart of value creation (e.g. Løwendahl et al., 2001). The successful implementation of SBS will result in increased value creation through the better utilization of previously accumulated knowledge and the development of new knowledge.
The firm that we study has 5000 employees, with headquarters in France and subsidiaries in 25 countries. The firm utilizes SBS as a strategic, internal tool in order to “build professional networks, develop competence by following others more skilled, finding out what others are doing and not reinventing the wheel, having things you’re working on easy to find and share, easily work with colleagues in other business units”.
A qualitative approach with a multiple case study design was selected in this study, because of the contemporary nature of the issue, and in order to gain deeper insights of the interplay of social software, strategy and organization. 29 open ended in-depth interviews with employees have been conducted over a 3 month period in four countries (Norway, Denmark, UK and Morocco) and at six subsidiaries. In addition participatory observations have been carried out at three subsidiaries involved in the study, with a two week field study at subsidiaries in Morocco in 2011, and longer periods of field studies at one of the Norwegian subsidiaries in 2010. Social network analysis has been used to visualize the qualitative findings in the computer program Netdraw and to get a better overview of collaboration tendencies.
Theoretical considerations
Since “[T]echnology per se can’t increase or decrease the production of the workers’ performance, only use of it can” (Orlikowski, 2000:425) we need to include relevant other variables than technology itself to examine overall collaboration and knowledge sharing tendencies within the company, and instead see what, if any, role SBS plays in these processes. This abstract asks the following research question;
• What are the central challenges that knowledge intensive firms face when using SBS as an internal collaboration tool?
