Exploring use and benefit of corporate social software. Measuring success in the Siemens case References+
| Published date | 08 August 2016 |
| Date | 08 August 2016 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JSIT-03-2016-0021 |
| Pages | 277-296 |
| Author | Alexander Stocker,Johannes Müller |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information systems,Information & communications technology |
Exploring use and benet of
corporate social software
Measuring success in the Siemens
case Referencesⴙ
Alexander Stocker
Virtual Vehicle, Graz, Austria, and
Johannes Müller
Building Technologies Division, Siemens Switzerland Ltd.,
Zug, Switzerland
Abstract
Purpose – To measure the success of corporate social software (CSS), interviews, surveys, content and
usage data analysis have been commonly used in practice. While interviews and surveys are only capable of
making perceived use and benets transparent, usage data analysis reveals many objective facts but does
not allow insights into potential user-benets. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to link both perspectives to
advance CSS success measuring.
Design/methodology/approach – The research case is References⫹, a Corporate Social Software
developed at Siemens to facilitate worldwide sharing of knowledge, experiences, and best practices since
2005. References⫹currently has around 15,000 registered members located in more than 80 countries. This
paper evaluates results from a user survey with nearly 1,500 responding employees and links all survey
results to the corresponding participant’s data on platform use to generate additional insights.
Findings – The paper generates ndings on how CSS is used in practice and how it is perceived by
employees of a large-scale enterprise. Furthermore, it explores how a combination of subjective and objective
evaluation methods can be applied to advance the state-of-the-art in measuring use and benets. By linking
CSS usage data to corresponding survey data, the paper provides results on what type of use of CSS may
create what type of benet.
Practical implications – This study encourages practitioners to take advantage of a variety of
instruments for measuring the benets of CSS. It generates numerous arguments for practitioners on how to
make the benet of CSS more transparent to nancial-oriented decision-makers to successfully defend
knowledge management projects against shrinking IT budgets.
Originality/value – This paper is one of the rst attempts to explore the relationship between
“perceived use” and “perceived benets” measured by surveys and “factual use” measured by CSS
usage statistics for knowledge management research. The ndings of this paper may empower the role
of user surveys in generating additional insights on use and benets.
Keywords Knowledge management, Measurement, Knowledge sharing, Social software,
Enterprise 2.0, Information system
Paper type Case study
1. Introduction and motivation: the rise of corporate social software
The Word Wide Web has undergone a tremendous paradigm shift: it has transformed
from a Web of passive, information-consuming users to Web 2.0, which is, to a very
large extent, co-created by its active content publishers. As a matter of fact, the social
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1328-7265.htm
Corporate
social
software
277
Received 14 March 2016
Accepted 25 April 2016
Journalof Systems and
InformationTechnology
Vol.18 No. 3, 2016
pp.277-296
©Emerald Group Publishing Limited
1328-7265
DOI 10.1108/JSIT-03-2016-0021
dimension of Web 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2005) has become equally important as its technical
dimension, as people have generated vast amounts of information on the Web in a
self-organized way, is driven by their joy of use. They create, share and modify Web
content, thereby becoming more and more connected to like-minded persons
participating in virtual communities and social networks.
The huge success of Web 2.0 platforms in sharing data, information and knowledge
has inspired corporate knowledge managers (Panahi et al., 2013,Paroutis and Al Saleh,
2009;Razmerita et al., 2009;Roblek et al., 2013;Schneckenberg, 2009). Soon,
organizations started to investigate and use the potential of Web 2.0 within their
intranets. They aim to facilitate knowledge sharing and social networking by adopting
successful concepts, applications and technologies of Web 2.0. Hence, an ongoing
transformation has begun in enterprises, while intranets are becoming ecosystems
similar to the Web. Corporate social software (CSS) is a commonly used and accepted
umbrella term for Web 2.0-based information systems (ISs) in organizations.
Archetypes of CSS have been heavily investigated in the past to learn more about
their corporate adoption, including wikis (Majchrzak et al., 2006;Arazy et al., 2009;
Stocker et al., 2012a), blogs (Emova and Grudin, 2007;Kosonen et al., 2007;Stocker
et al., 2008), microblogs (Müller and Stocker, 2011;Stocker et al., 2012b) and social
networking services (Richter and Koch, 2008;Richter and Riemer, 2009). Researchers
have used a series of instruments to investigate occurring phenomena when social
software is implemented in an organization, including observations, interviews,
surveys, data analyses and case studies. Amongst those phenomena, use and benet
(Holtzblatt et al., 2012;Kügler and Smolnik, 2013;Majumdar et al., 2013) are vital
subjects of research.
The scientic community has published a series of models and theories to better
understand how IS use and benet are created and which factors have the highest
inuence on them. Among them, the technology acceptance model from Davis (1989)
and the ISs success model from DeLone and McLean (1992 and 2003) have been studied
further in CSS adoption. Both models are often used as a foundation to establish
instruments for measuring social software success in terms of use and benet (Kügler
et al., 2015;Hsu and Lin, 2008;Steinhüser et al., 2012;Richter et al., 2013b).
However, measuring use and benet of CSS is still at an early stage. There are many
reasons for this: rst, there are only few mature long-term cases, where CSS has evolved
and been used over time to a sufcient extent to allow a signicant benet to be
generated for individuals and their organization. Even fewer case studies provide real
evidence on benets generated by using information shared in CSS. As it is challenging
for project managers to argue benets generated from CSS to senior management in a
practical and understandable way, numerous projects have been canceled because of
shrinking IT budgets. This makes it difcult for researchers to nd mature long-term
cases for further in-depth investigation. This is where the wheel comes full circle.
Against this background, we dene the research scope of our paper as follows:
• First, it provides a literature review on CSS, citing relevant cases where use and/or
benet have been the focus of research.
• Second, it introduces the Siemens case References⫹, where practical instruments
for measuring use and benet of CSS have been applied since 2005.
JSIT
18,3
278
To continue reading
Request your trial