Collaboration and enterprise social media

Overview

The design of collaboration processes in digital work systems is the focus of this research area. Digital technologies are used to automate processes and tasks, thus changing the way people collaborate. The focus is no longer solely on collaboration between people. Increasing digitization has also made human-machine collaboration more and more important. For this reason, we are researching how digital technologies are changing different work systems (e.g. software development, financial consulting, recruitment, etc.), how their challenges can be analyzed and structured, and which aspects promote or hinder the acceptance of digital work systems.

Within the scope of this research, the “ECM ABC” was developed based on a large number of projects with companies, which as a process model is able to analyze challenges of digital work systems and collaboration in companies in order to derive corresponding implications for their effective and efficient design.

An essential technology for collaboration is social media. Social media became known through its use in private. For over 20 years, people have been creating profiles on these platforms, networking with their friends and acquaintances, and sharing content. Spurred by the growing impact and capabilities of social media in private, enterprises increasingly began to use social media for their needs. Enterprise social media is the term derived from the umbrella term social media and is defined as a social medium that supports internal communication, knowledge sharing and interaction processes within a company or between organizations. Unlike the external use of social media, which spans many public platforms, most organizations implement an integrated social media platform that includes multiple types of enterprise social media. For example, most internal social media platforms mimic popular social networking sites such as Facebook in appearance, operation and functionality. However, embedded within this platform are often blogs and wikis, as well as types of enterprise social media through which social tagging and document sharing can occur. In our research, we develop usage scenarios for enterprise social media and analyze usage behavior in the platforms to draw conclusions about the influence of social networks on digital work systems.