Almost every week a new social networking service (SNS) has its go-live, and the extent and frequency of the use of services for private social networking are increasing strongly. SNS are defined by Boyd and Ellison [BE07] as „web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.”
Besides private use, open SNS as well as closed SNS are also used for supporting the exchange of implicit knowledge (of employees) within and between enterprises. As a result, SNS replace or extend the “Yellow Pages” which have so far been used in enterprises as a sort of expertise finding tools [KRS07]. Due to the fact that SNS have been developed just recently, and as the development speed of the services is enormous, large research gaps exist in this field. So far neither the basic functionalities of SNS have been identified or categorized nor have experiences with the use of SNS in the enterprise been analyzed. Thus, there is a lack of awareness for problems / barriers (or lessons learned) concerning when and how to use SNS. The goal of the dissertation project “Towards a Framework for Social Networking Services” is to identify success factors for and barriers / limiting factors of the deployment of SNS in the enterprise and their reciprocal relations as illustrated in the figure below.
Figure: A framework for Social Networking Services
So far: From reviewing existing internal and external SNS I have firstly extracted six distinct functionalities of SNS, namely identity management, expert finding, context awareness, contact management, network awareness and common exchange [RiKo08a]. Building on this categorization I have then conducted an online survey to support the categorization and to rate the importance of the different functions from the perspective of users of open SNS in Germany. Some important results of the study are that functions that support common exchange (83%) and awareness (78%) were valued as most important, whereas the functions that enable identity management where valued less important (58%). 70% of the respondents attached importance to the occasional introduction of new functions, 12% did not [RiKo08b].
Right now I am working with several companies like IBM, SAP, Accenture that use internal SNS. In interviews I want to identify success factors of the use of SNS. Especially the case of IBM is very revealing. IBM has been using an Intranet-based directory, supplemented with additional entries on the users’ expert knowledge and skills, named ‘IBM Blue Pages’, for more than ten years and the employees are very used to the possibility to search experts in a system. One main success factor that has been identified in the interviews was that the system (now called Fringe) is very well integrated in other collaboration systems like Lotus Sametime (an instant messenger). In the following months I will intensify my cooperation with the companies to improve the use of the SNS and to further identify success factors and lessons learned. Moreover I will compare the results of the survey of the private use of SNS with the exigencies in companies (deduced from the results of the interviews) with the aim to adept some of the functionalities, and use cases of open and closed SNS.
Some Partners:
Ansprechpartner von Seiten der Forschungsgruppe Kooperationssysteme:
Alexander Richter
References
[AgMc99] Agranoff, R.;McGuire, M. (1999). Managing in network settings. In Policy Studies Review, 16 (1), S. 18-41.
[BE07] Boyd, D. M. and Ellison, N.B.: Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 11, http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html (accessed January 7, 2008)
[Gra73] Granovetter, M.: The Strength of Weak Ties. In: American Journal of Sociology, 6, 1973; S. 1360-1380.
[KRS07] Koch, M.; Richter, A.; Schlosser, A.: Services and applications for IT-supported social networking in companies, In: Wirtschaftsinformatik, 6, 2007.
[Kum+00] Kumar,R.; Raghavan, P.; Rajagopalan, S.; Sivakumar, D.; Tompkins, A.; Upfal, E.: The Web as a graph. Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART symposium, Dallas.
[Mil67] Milgram, S.: The small word problem, in: Psychology Today, 1, S. 62-67
[ReMc03] Reagens, R.; McEvily, B.. Network Structure and Knowledge Transfer: The Effects of Cohesion and Range. In Administrative Science Quarterly, 48, 240-267.
[RiKo08a] Richter,A.; Koch, M.: Funktionen von Social-Networking-Diensten. Proc. Multikonferenz Wirtschaftsinformatik 2008.
[RiKo08b] Richter,A.; Koch, M.: Functions of Social Networking Services. Proc. Intl. Conf. on the Design of Cooperative Systems 2008, Carry-le-Rouet, France, Springer.
