Joint Work and Information Sharing in the Modern Digital Workplace: How the Introduction of “Social” Features Shaped Enterprise Collaboration Systems

The last 10 years have seen the implementation of a new kind of collaboration software in companies that contains “social” features and is opening up new possibilities for employees to be connected (i.e. to form Enterprise Social Networks) and to exchange information, ideas and documents with each other. The introduction and adoption of this new kind of software is challenging and requires changes both in the company culture and in the ways that people work together. In this chapter, I present the findings from a longitudinal research project on the implementation and adoption of Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS). Over the last three years, my research team has accompanied a group of (mostly large) German-speaking companies in their introduction of an integrated, large-scale, socially-enabled ECS. We observed that the introduction of such a system is substantially different from other large-scale software systems (e.g. ERP Systems) due to their malleable nature and their need to be shaped through use. The social features that the latest generation of collaboration software embodies, require employees to develop new skills and forces organisations to develop new capabilities to successfully manage the required change. Our analysis of the collected research data (from interviews, workshops and questionnaires) revealed six archetypes of ECS use. Three of them focus on people and the support of information and knowledge management. The other three are primarily concerned with the support of specific business processes. The archetypes provide us with a useful lens to think about the aims and objectives of collaboration projects and represent the current state of ECS use in an organisation.