The Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate School

College of Information Sciences and Technology

HARNESSING SOCIAL MEDIA COLLABORATIVE

INTELLIGENCE TO CHAMPION ENTERPRISE

INNOVATION

A Dissertation in

Information Sciences and Technology

by

Suwan Juntiwasarakij

© 2012 Suwan Juntiwasarakij

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

May 2012 The dissertation of Suwan Juntiwasarakij was reviewed and approved* by the following:

Irene J. Petrick Senior Lecturer of Information Sciences and Technology Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee

Heng Xu Assistant Professor of Information Sciences and Technology

Scarlett Miller Assistant Professor of Engineering Affiliated Faculty of Information Sciences and Technology

Sam Hunter Assistant Professor of Psychology

Marry Beth Rosson Director of Graduate Programs of Information Sciences and Technology

*Signatures are on file in the Graduate School

ii ABSTRACT

Innovation is a survival tool for the corporate world to play in the ever competitive free global market in the 21st century. The innovation process, especially at the front end, is the most challenging phase because of the inextricably intertwined fuzziness of high uncertainty and the deficiency of information available. Although the uncertainty is irremovable, the input of the information can be improved by motivating people to generate more ideas. In this regard, social media presents unprecedented opportunities for a company to internally improve information processing at the front end of innovation. However, unlike legacy software systems which are built to last, harnessing the power of social media requires committed effort since social media is built to change. This dissertation focuses on the governance and architecture necessary to go beyond the pilot project state. Drawn from two large, multinational companies’ social media platform systems, the findings show that the implementation of successful, sustainable enterprise social media platforms recognizes emerging socio-psychological layers comprised of social capital formation, organic arrangement, vernacular collaboration protocol, and elastic governance. This research provides a framework for enterprise social media in support of innovation and offers practical recommendations for users, designers, managers, executives, enterprises, and prospective adopters.

iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures ...... ix List of Tables...... x Acknowledgements ...... xi

Chapter 1. Introduction...... 1 1.1. Sustainable Implementation...... 4 1.2. Dissertation Organization ...... 6

Chapter 2. Literature Review...... 8 2.1. Innovation in Organizational Context ...... 8 2.1.1. Innovation and Organizational Culture ...... 9 2.1.2. Innovation and Organizational Performance ...... 10 2.2. Complexity at the Front End of Innovation ...... 11 2.2.1. Complexity Portrayal of the Front End ...... 12 2.2.2. Managing the Fuzziness at the Front End...... 13 2.2.2.1.Process-Oriented Approaches ...... 15 2.2.2.2.Apprehending Emergent Behaviors...... 16 2.3. Importance of Information Technology on Innovation Process...... 17 2.4. Social Media Software Facilitating Innovation...... 19 2.4.1. Social Media at Large...... 20 2.4.1.1.Web 2.0...... 20 2.4.1.2.Social Software...... 21 2.4.2. Social Media, the Crowd, and the Intelligence ...... 22 2.4.2.1.Wisdom of the Crowd...... 22 2.4.2.2.Social Media for Collective Intelligence ...... 23 2.4.3. Social Media in Use for Innovation ...... 24 2.4.4. Web 2.0 Cultures and Information Security Practice and Policy...... 26

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS (cont.)

2.5. Theoretical Orientation...... 28 2.5.1. Complexity Adaptive System ...... 30 2.5.1.1.Organization as Complex Adaptive System ...... 30 2.5.1.2.Innovation as Complexity ...... 31 2.5.2. Social Capital Theory...... 34 2.5.2.1.Institutional-Based Trust...... 36 2.5.2.2.Trust on the Absence of Face-to-Face Communication ...... 37 2.5.3. Creativity and Innovation ...... 37 2.5.3.1.The Notions and the Relation...... 38 2.5.3.2.The Factors Influencing Innovation...... 39 2.5.4. Knowledge Management Theories...... 41 2.5.4.1.Contemporary Organizational KM Research...... 41 2.5.4.2.Tacit and Explicit Knowledge Transformation...... 43 2.5.4.3.Managing Knowledge with Social Media Software...... 44 2.5.5. Socio-Technical System (STS) ...... 45 2.6. Chapter Summary...... 46

Chapter 3. Research Design...... 47 3.1. Research Background and Motivation...... 47 3.2. Research Objectives and Questions...... 49 3.3. Interpretative Epistemology...... 51 3.4. Research Methods and Instruments...... 52 3.4.1. Qualitative Interview ...... 53 3.4.1.1. Interview Question Model...... 53 3.4.1.2. Interview Procedure...... 55 3.4.2. Case Study ...... 55

v TABLE OF CONTENTS (cont.)

3.4.3. Data Collection...... 56 3.4.3.1. Study Phases...... 56 3.4.3.2. Document Review ...... 57 3.4.3.3. Interview ...... 57 3.4.4. Data Analysis ...... 58 3.4.4.1. Initial Research Framework ...... 58 3.4.4.2. Data Analysis Procedure...... 61 3.4.5. Research Evaluation Criteria ...... 63 3.5. Chapter Summary...... 64

Chapter 4. Case Study Introduction ...... 65 4.1. Global Engineering Solution (GES)...... 65 4.2. Universal Business Sourcing (UBS)...... 66 4.3. Adoption Enhancer ...... 68 4.4. Operational Context & Control...... 69 4.5. Participation Architecture ...... 71 4.6. Entertainment Value ...... 72 4.7. Alternative Knowledge Management ...... 74 4.7.1. Democratic Approach...... 74 4.7.2. Transient Approach ...... 75 4.7.3. Corporate Jewel Vault ...... 75 4.8. Chapter Summary...... 76

Chapter 5. Enterprise Social Media through CAS Lens...... 78 5.1. Social Capital Formation ...... 78 5.1.1. Trust in Network ...... 78 5.1.1.1.Accessibility...... 79

vi TABLE OF CONTENTS (cont.)

5.1.1.2.Dynamics of Participation...... 79 5.1.1.3.Reception and Coaching ...... 80 5.1.2. Trust in People ...... 81 5.1.2.1.Rich Profile ...... 81 5.1.2.2.Trust off the Platform ...... 83 5.1.3. Trust in Content...... 84 5.1.4. Functional Reputation...... 86 5.2. Organic Arrangement ...... 87 5.2.1. Organic Network...... 87 5.2.1.1.Organic Group vs. Structured Work Group...... 89 5.2.1.2.Closed Group...... 90 5.2.2. Organic Knowledge...... 91 5.2.2.1.Access to Tacit Knowledge...... 91 5.2.2.2.Breaking Isolated Knowledge Silos...... 92 5.2.3. Traversing the Organic Network...... 93 5.2.4. Decision Making Empowerment...... 95 5.3. Vernacular Collaboration Protocol...... 96 5.3.1. Leveled Communication and Collaboration ...... 96 5.3.2. Participatory Affordance...... 97 5.4. Elastic Governance...... 99 5.4.1. Trust-Based Control ...... 97 5.4.2. Community-Based Surveillance...... 100 5.4.3. Passive Control...... 100 5.4.4. Corporate Social Media Policy ...... 101 5.4.4.1.Incrementalism ...... 101 5.4.4.2.Localization...... 102 5.5. Chapter Summary...... 103

vii TABLE OF CONTENTS (cont.)

Chapter 6. Discussion...... 104 6.1. Research Objective Revisited...... 104 6.2. Refined Research Framework ...... 105 6.3. Research Question 1 ...... 107 6.4. Research Question 2 ...... 107 6.5. Research Question 3 ...... 108 6.6. Research Question 4 ...... 109 6.7. Chapter Summary...... 110

Chapter 7. Conclusion...... 111 7.1. Contribution of the Research ...... 111 7.1.1. Contribution to Exploration ...... 111 7.1.2. Contribution to Theory...... 111 7.2. Practical Implication of the Research...... 113 7.2.1. Implication for Executives, Managers...... 113 7.2.2. Implication for Users...... 114 7.2.3. Implication for Designers ...... 115 7.2.4. Implication for Enterprise...... 116 7.2.5. Implication for Perspective Adopter ...... 118 7.3. Limitation of the Research...... 119 7.4. Future Research Agenda and Directions ...... 120

References...... 122

Appendix A: Semi-Structure Interview Questions for End-Users...... 147 Appendix B: Semi-Structure Interview Questions for Designers ...... 148 Appendix C: Semi-Structure Interview Questions for Executives (Managers)...... 149

viii LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: The complexity at the Front End of Innovation ...... 14 Figure 2: Pillars of Collaborative Intelligence ...... 24 Figure 3: Phenomenon Studied and Theoretical Involvement...... 28 Figure 4: Feedback and Feed-forward Loops ...... 32 Figure 5: Social Capital in the Creation of New Intellectual Capital...... 35 Figure 6: Framework of Intelligence and Organizational Innovation...... 39 Figure 7: Research Interview Model ...... 54 Figure 8: Initial Research Framework...... 60 Figure 9: Data Analysis Procedure...... 62 Figure 10: Emerging Trust Interplays ...... 86 Figure 11: Illustration of Retreating Island of Knowledge...... 93 Figure 12: Refined Research Framework ...... 106 Figure 13: Self-Evolving Trust ...... 110

ix LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: Theoretical Foundations and Relevance ...... 28 Table 2: Three Different Perspectives on Information Security Working Domain ...... 49 Table 3: Views of Dichotomy between Quantitative and Qualitative Social Science ...... 52 Table 4: Case Study Companies and Participation ...... 58 Table 5: Vision on Enterprise Social Media Platform...... 117

x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my academic advisor and thesis chair, Dr. Irene Petrick. Beyond her guidance in help me to fulfill my academic obligations, her support is invaluable. Dr. Petrick has showed me what being professional as a professor, researcher, and mentor is. I learn and adopt these qualities with me in both my professional and personal life. I thank for the members of my thesis committee Dr. Heng Xu, Dr. Sam Hunter, and Dr. Scarlett Miller for their intellectual insights and guidance. I thank for the case companies and all the participants for tirelessly helping me to successfully carry out the data collection process.

I thank College of Information Sciences and Technology for admitting me into their programs. I thank all the faculty members whom I met through IST for their helpful insights and discussions. They help me to develop scientist and researcher’s personality to think academically and practically. I would like to thank all the administrative staff who is always available for providing assistances. I thank my fellow IST graduate students, who always show up even on weekends, for their support, humor, and courtesy. Without them, it would have been less interesting and lonely journey.

I would like to thank the Royal Thai Government for their financial support over the course of my academic journey and for their granting me the opportunity to further higher education aboard. Besides education obtained, experiencing Western culture gives me a whole new worldview which is important to be living in the twenty first century that individuals become global citizens.

Last but not least, I would like to thank my Mother, who is always there to support me throughout the course of my Ph.D. journey.

xi Chapter 1: Introduction

The current business environment of global market diversification, trade liberalization, and rapid technological improvement poses new challenges. Innovation is a survival tool that enterprises must use if they are to play the game of business in the competitive free global market. 1 Industry players do not play the game lightheartedly. Instead, they play hard and in doing so push the boundaries of the marketplace. GE and 3M, for instance, provide their employees with funding assistance and even allow them to work on their own projects—projects that often have potential market value—on regular office time. Toward the end of each calendar year, approximately one-third of these knowledge workers are promoted, one-third remain in their current jobs, while one-third must engage in a formal self-evaluation. Everybody feels the rumble. Everybody is affected by the game.

The penalty for failing keep up with the innovation revolution is certain death. Kodak, for example, once a multinational imaging and photographic equipment giant, is facing Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Why? Primarily, it ignored the potential of digital-imaging innovation because company decision makers thought that low-resolution digital imaging and the camera equipment that came with it were just toys. In a similar vein, RealPlayer was once well known for its real-time audio and video decoding innovation. In fact, it was the first to bring a portable MP3 player to market. However, RealPlayer’s decision makers ignored the innovation and development work going on in the digital portable music player market because RealPlayer’s decision makers thought low-quality digital music streams wouldn’t go very far.

1 Innovation is one of the critical strategies providing the enterprise a means to secure and enhance market share (Hemmatfar, Salehi, & Bayat, 2010) and to thrive in sustainable competitive advantage (Drucker, 2006; Hitt, Ireland, Camp, & Sexton, 2001; Kuratko, Ireland, Covin, & Hornsby, 2005). Thus, the ability to innovate is considered a fundamental and essential component of competitive edge embedded within an enterprise’s structures, processes, products, and services (Gunday, Ulusoy, Kilic, & Alpkan, 2009; Lefebvre & Lefebvre, 1993; Ritter & Gemunden, 2004)

1 The innovation process, especially at the front end, is the most challenging phase because of the inextricably intertwined fuzziness of high uncertainty, little information, and influence. Closely examined, although such uncertainty cannot be done away with, we can improve the input of the information. In addition, much information necessary to the innovation process is generated by individuals, the employees within the company. That is, to improve the input of the information at the front end of the innovation is to get—to motivate—people to generate more ideas. In this regard, companies need a tool designed to elicit ideas from their people and connect them to the decision makers in the companies’ information loops. Here, information technology would be of service and social media in particular would be a practical conveyance.

The utilitarian power of social media is manifested in a variety of ways related to scope and scale, ranging from reconnecting with long-lost friends and family, to working on a 6th -grade group homework project, to collaborating with business partners located in different continents, and to facilitating a social movement in the Arab Spring on the streets of Tunisia. In this regard, social media offers a platform for communicating and collaborating in a group context, even changing the world. Social media definitely has social impact. Putting global market competitiveness together with the power of social media, leads to the realization that social media could also have an impact on business by benefiting organizational innovation.

Enriched by Web 2.0 technologies, social media provides exceptional user experiences. Social media gives birth to crowd sourcing, which derives from and is harnessed for the communicative and collaborative power that is drastically changing consumer dynamics as the speed at which users are joining related platforms. Likewise, social media can be used to break down knowledge silos and direct employees’ intelligence and creativity into a company’s innovation and information loop. In terms of the enterprise, social media’s potential as an internal innovation remains a largely untapped business opportunity mainly because of a lack of practical implementation frameworks and guidelines.

2 Social media presents an unprecedented opportunity 2 for a company to improve internal information processing at the front end of innovation. However, the social media itself may be considered too unconventional for corporate use, as social media is philosophically different from the legacy systems: 3democratizing knowledge and liberalizing user-generated information (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). That is, while the legacy systems are built to last for providing essential business services under corporate controls, social media software is built to change . Therefore, a different approach is needed to implement social media platforms for corporate use.

There is a report of a very successful case using an IT system to support the innovation process in research and development (R&D) units at Wella AG, a beauty products company, which was taken over by Proctor and Gamble in 2003 (Boeddrich, 2004). After deploying the computer-aided idea management system, which was built upon IBM Lotus Notes, Wella AG was able to (1) dramatically boost its stock share value, (2) motivate workers to develop new ideas and capture all of the ideas, (3) make the idea management process more transparent, and (4) reduce IP conflicts. In this regard, the software system proved useful for supporting activities in the FFE phase in the innovation process.

Another successful story is Boeing-Rocketdyne’s radical innovation without collocation (Malhotra, Majchrzak, Carman, & Lott, 2001). Boeing-Rocketdyne, the major liquid- fueled rocket engine manufacturer in the United States, initiated the project team “SLICE” (Simple Low-cost Innovative Concepts Engine), and deployed computer- mediated collaborative technology. The company was able to co-develop the products

2 Recently, social software has phenomenally been a hot topic in social computing. Psychologically, some social software applications, such as blogs (Kawaura, Yamashita, & Kawakami, 1999; Miura & Yamashita, 2007), satisfy its users because it responds to an individual’s social and psychological needs (Alm, 2006). It, to demonstrate, liberalizes individuals to freely express, produce, and consume information over social media (Fuchs, 2010). Moreover, it is believed that social software is capable of stimulating, facilitating, or nurturing ideation in the FFE phase, which are the most critical and challenging phase in innovation process due to its characteristics and complexity, especially the ideation. Therefore, social media is expected to harness the complexity in the FFE phase, capture ideas generated, support information processing, make such information and ideas searchable, and transform them into organizational knowledge repository.

3 However, relaxing control which results in the liberalization of information could pose uncomfortable factors to the managements in several managerial and security threats to the enterprise such as synchronicity, privacy, security, connectivity, work-life issue, non-systematic controls, information overload, and arbitrary filtering of communication.

3 with co-located and non co-located team members seamlessly. As a result, Boeing- Rocketdyne developed the radically innovative rocket-engine, which was able to reduce the cost of a rocket engine by 10,000%. Also, Boeing-Rocketdyne was able to commercialize the rocket engine 1,000% faster than conventional ones.

However, using a social media platform for IT-based projects is not sufficient for achieving implementation and deployment. Implementing social media platforms requires a committed effort. Without a proper business goal, efforts to continually push innovation—including adopting an IT-based social media platform—are likely to yield sub-optimal results. The next section presents a descriptive case study that shows the importance of commitment and focus to the success of efforts to establish a corporate social media platform.

1.1 Sustainable Implementation

GlobalPharma is a successful multinational pharmaceutical giant, with tens of billions in revenue, and hundreds of billions in total assets. Company activities include research and development, manufacturing, and sales. GlobalPharma Corporation has been in existence for several decades and during that time has consistently innovated in pharmaceutical- related products and processes. The IT division of GlobalPharma embarked on a worldwide internal campaign to encourage IT employees in all its subsidiaries to offer their ideas for new products and businesses using a new innovative social media tool. The CreativeWave was an in-house social software application designed to get employees to participate in an innovation program at GlobalPharma. The initial target audience was IT employees. The CreativeWave vision was to eventually use the platform as a service for the entire organization. To fulfill this goal, employees were encouraged to submit their ideas to specific challenges and vote on other ideas that were submitted. The most feasible and innovative were rewarded with funding in order to complete their award- winning projects.

4 The initiative was designed to be launched in multiple phases. In the first phase, the concentration was on development and delivery of the social networking platform and it primarily focused on the IT department and its employees. At the beginning, employees participated in droves as they were excited by the idea of social media and the possibility of having their ideas recognized. However, by the three month mark, the initial effort had lost momentum. According to the senior sponsor of the project, “Our first launch provided insights on how people used the tool and how they expected to be engaged. We wanted to get a large number of people using the platform across the corporation to increase our understanding.” In the first year, over 15 communities were set up on the CreativeWave platform. All had successful initial launches but could not sustain the momentum.

In analyzing the first phase the team realized that the CreativeWave was not marketed in a consistent way; therefore, people tended to forget that it was still up and running. It needed to be constantly pushed to become firmly established in people’s routines. In addition, the effort required to support and run an innovation challenge was significant and without a consistent process, responses to idea submissions were delayed.

In the second major launch, more supporting communication and engagement was provided. In addition, instead of hosting multiple innovation challenges per year, the team decided to host only 1-2 per year, minimizing the support effort. To ensure consistency in evaluation, a formal process was developed to evaluate the ideas and even train ideators on how to expand their ideas. The latter helped to improve quality of the ideas. Finally, the team focused on recognizing participants regardless of whether their idea was selected or not.

The second launch of CreativeWave received 91 ideas of which six were selected for further investment. And, presently the IT department is getting additional inquiries from other departments to use the platform. An important lesson learned from this effort, according to the sponsor, is that “the social networking tool itself is not the answer nor is just having a “dropbox” process for people to submit ideas. You also need to have a

5 comprehensive innovation process in place that leverages the social networking platform as a facilitator for part of the process. And, as with any other major project/program you must have the appropriate communications and engagement strategy to keep the momentum and awareness high.”

Perhaps, the main problem in this implementation equation was the design. First, such a platform should be aligned with the company’s objectives and business goals. In this particular case, it became evident that the designers did not have a concrete roadmap, business case, or use case. The tool was just treated as an IT-project piloted by the IT department. In addition, there were no marketing plans pushing adoption and participation. Nor was there any effort to encourage participation by incorporating the tool into everyday work life. Overall, the first phase introduction of the CreativeWave was not well integrated in to the employees’ work structure. Therefore, the employees came to think of participating in the CreativeWave as “extra” work, not work assigned to them and not work to which they were fully committed. As a consequence, the tool became a low priority, and so it foundered. These early learning helped correct some initial problems, and the second launch of CreativeWave was much more successful.

1.2 Dissertation Organization

As illustrated in the previous section, for a social media platform to thrive, a concerted effort is required in terms of implementation and deployment. It is not enough to treat such a platform as an IT-based project. Hence, this dissertation explores how enterprises can domesticate and accommodate social media platforms to support the generation of ideas internally, brainstorming, and concept development at the front end of the innovation process. More importantly, this research focuses on the governance and architecture necessary to go beyond the pilot project state. The case studies offered in this research are drawn from existing, sustainable, ongoing social media platform systems. The research itself focused on crafting a practical framework and recommendations for enterprises.

6 This dissertation is organized as follows. Chapter 2 provides a discussion of the relevant literature about innovations in organizational contexts, the complexity of the innovation process, and techno-informational links between innovation and social media, as well as a comprehensive review of theories and how they guide the present research. Chapter 3 presents a holistic view of the research design, comprising research objectives and questions, interpretive epistemology, and research methods and instruments. In particular, the methods and instruments section incorporates the data collection components, the research framework, and the data analysis process, procedures, and techniques. Chapter 4 offers a background and brief history of two case study companies that have successfully implemented sustainable social media for internal innovation. Chapters 5 and 6 show the findings compiled according to the research objectives and research questions. Chapter 7 discusses the research findings and their implications for theory and practice. Chapter 8 restates the research findings, the contributions of the research, its practical implications, an agenda for further research, directions in social computing research, together with concluding remarks.

7 Chapter 2: Literature Review

This dissertation research engaged with the complexity that characterizes the nature of emerging behaviors in the fuzzy front end phase and the features of social media applications in organizational contexts. Competitiveness in the business world brought market uncertainty to enterprises which are in turn driven to innovate in order not only to stay competitive, but also to survive. As a result, organization culture can be influenced by adopting innovation along with collaborative technology, and the technology itself even adds more complexity into the organization. This chapter reviews the literature on related study areas that fall under the umbrella of five theoretical premises. Toward the end of the chapter, the issues and potential research gaps are discussed in relation to the rationale for determining the theoretical orientation of this study.

2.1 Innovation in Organizational Context

Since the 1980’s, the global business and market have become increasingly more competitive, which, in turn, drives companies to be focused on their business strategies and strive for innovation in order to survive and be on top of their game (Kuratko & Hodgetts, 1998). Over almost three decades, innovation studies have become renewed, revived, and attractive to researchers, organizational scientists, and enterprises who are trying to understand its antecedents, processes, and impacts. Moreover, the pressure from costs, time, and more complex technology added new dimensions of necessity to firms to pursue being innovative (Ritter & Gemunden, 2004). However, the interwoven complexity mentioned above is in essence considered an opportunity for businesses to harness the environmental uncertainty to pursue the innovation for business competitiveness (Sull, 2009).

8 2.1.1 Innovation and Organizational Culture

According to the contemporary literature, the interpretive view of organizational culture may be framed as a paradigmatic shared mental model deriving a set of tacit corporate conducts. The often cited definition of culture is provided by Hofstede (1984): “culture is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another” (p. 25). However, contemporary definitions of organization are different from Hofstede (1984). Robbins & Langton (1983) argued that a strong culture yields a set of shared mentality and values that hold individuals onto the same track. Schein (1992) metaphorically uses his iceberg model to describe culture which is everything invisible “under the waterline.” Martin (2002) defined culture as a combination of belief, assumption, and meaning which were deeply imprinted in an organization. Likewise, Furnham & Gunter (1993) concluded that organizational culture functions as (1) mentality that holds and harmonizes the entire individual (internal integration) and (2) a social adhesive that keeps the organization as a whole together (coordination).

Often, the literature uses culture to describe organizational performance since the performance is a function of the culture. That is, if an organization could not function as described, the organizational performance and efficiency could fall significantly. Buckler (1997) gave a holistic view that culture and environment are a spiritual force that propels organizational innovation. Sull (2009) advocated that when an enterprise became weak, the only way to holistically improve overall performance and competitiveness was to innovate. He argue that enterprises were naturally complex, adaptive systems; such complexity within was in fact able to be harnessed, and consequently turned into innovative competency.

In other words, innovation in organizations is a function of organizational culture as the literature has shown strong evidence that cultural characteristics contribute to a supportive environment for innovation. Culture is a causal factor of innovation since a collection of favorable cultural elements is considered a necessary ingredient to

9 championing innovation and innovation process in an organization (Ahmed, 1998; Johnson, 1996; Judge, Fryxell, & Dooley, 1997; Martell, 1989; Martins, 2003; Pheysey, 1993; Pienaar, 1994; Robbins & Langton, 1983; Schuster, 1986; Shaughnessy, 1988; Tesluk, Farr, & Klein, 1997; Tushman & O'Reilly, 1997). To illustrate, Hurley & Hult (1998) summarized and then classified cultural characteristics that influence specific behaviors positively contributing to organizational innovativeness such as market focus, learning and development, power sharing, status differential, participative decision making, support and collaboration, communication, and tolerance for conflict and risk taking.4

2.1.2 Innovation and Organizational Performance

A large part of the contemporary literature is concerned with innovation capability of the firm and on the positive links between innovativeness and the firm’s corporate performance.5 Those studies aim to descriptively understand the concept of innovation by circumscribing the definition of total strategies of a firm apprehending innovations (Hitt, Ireland, Camp, & Sexton, 2001; Pinchot, 1985; Stevenson & Jarillo, 2007). However, a few studies showed negative relationships between the innovations and the firm’s performances (Capon, Farley, & Hoenig, 1990; Chandler & Hanks, 1994; Subramanian & Nilakanta, 1996).

Concluded from recent innovation literature, the links between innovation and organizational performances can be classified into several dimensions: technology (R&D and the number of patents) (Darroch, 2005; Ghosal & Nair-Reichert, 2009; Hall, Lotti, & Mairesse, 2009; Kirner, Kinkel, & Jaeger, 2009; Thornhill, 2006), product and process (Koellinger, 2008; Salomo, Talke, & Strecker, 2008), productivity (Cainelli, Evangelista,

4 The complete reading list of the contemporary studies of cultural characteristics contributing to supportive environment for innovation provided by Hurley & Hult (1998).

5 More examples can be found in Du & Farley, 2001, Antoncic & Hisrich, 2001; Barringer & Bluedorn, 1999; Calantone, Cavusgil, & Zhao, 2002; Damanpour & Evan, 1984; Damanpour, Szabat, & Evan, 1989; Deshpande, Farley, & Webster, 1993; Du & Farley, 2001; Gao & Fu, 1996; Garg, Walters, & Priem, 2003; Hagedoorn & Cloodt, 2003; Han, Namwoon, & Srivastava, 1998; Hornsby, Kuratko, & Zahra, 2002; Hult & Jr., 2001; Lefebvre & Lefebvre, 1993; McGrath, Tsai, Venkataraman, & MacMillan, 1996; Narver & Slater, 1990; Olson & Schwab, 2000; Santos & Peffers, 1995; Walker, 2005; Wu, Mahajan, & Balasubramanian, 2003; and, Yilmaz, Alpkan, & Ergun, 2005.

10 & Savona, 2006; Ghosal & Nair-Reichert, 2009; Griffith, Huergo, Mairesse, & Peters, 2010; Hall, Lotti, & Mairesse, 2006; Hall, et al., 2009; Lööf & Heshmati, 2006; Rochina- Barrachina, Mañez, & Sanchis-Llopis, 2010; Thornhill, 2006), growth and economics (Cainelli, et al., 2006; Coad & Rao, 2008; Hall, et al., 2006; Koellinger, 2008; Lööf & Heshmati, 2006; Mansury & Love, 2008), and process and knowledge management (Darroch, 2005; Salomo, et al., 2008). Despite different measurements, the conclusion may be made that the performance gained, given the innovation, iterates itself. This may result in increasing firm’s performances and the innovativeness. Nevertheless, much of the literature has not discussed the complexity in nature of the innovation process, especially at the very beginning of the process.

Another implication is, taking on a resource-based view, that knowledge is considered as a raw material enabling innovation which in turn improves performance of the firm. Although the importance of knowledge transactions and activities (i.e. sharing, exchanging, transferring, learning, etc.) were emphasized, the role of knowledge management (as a tool) and the role of information technology (as a tool’s enabler) have been underrepresented from this view.

2.2 Complexity at the Front End of Innovation 6

The innovation process is considered a complex system in an organizational setting, which is in turn elusive to achieve and sustain (Dougherty & Hardy, 1996; Jelinek & Schoonhoven, 1990; Usher, 1954). According to Garud, Gehman, & Kumaraswamy (Forthcoming), such complexity in the innovation process is due to its non-linear nature (Ven, 1986); mixed intervention and interaction among multiple actors, groups, and

6 Fuzzy Front End (FFE), popularized by (Smith & Reinertsen, 1997), is know in the literature such as Pre- Development (Cooper & Kleinschmidt, 1994), Idea Fruition Process (Griffiths-Hemans & Grover, 2006), Front End of Innovation, Phase 0, Stage 0, Ideation Phase, or Pre-Project-Activities. In light of innovation process, there is a consensus that FFE is the most critically challenging part of the innovation process as it is practicably and theoretically less-structured (Herstatt & Verworn, 2004). There is evidence that the enterprises capable of dealing with this pre- development step display high tendency to thrive in the innovation process (Cooper, 1988, 1992, 1998; Dwyer & Mellor, 1991; McGuinness & Conway, 1989; Montoya-Weiss & Calantone, 1994). In addition, the amount of resources invested in FFE and the quality of execution of FFE activities (Cooper & Kleinschmidt, 1993) is a strong indicator to enterprise’s successfulness in innovation process and product success. Due to this criticality and important of FFE phase, guidelines and tools are needed in order to succeed in FFE activities.

11 technologies across different practices (Callon, 1987; Dougherty, 1992; Hargadon & Sutton, 1997; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995); and an unpredictable spectrum of outcomes in spite of simple rules imposed (Davis, Eisenhardt, & Bingham, 2009). Morel & Ramanujam (1999) arranged a categorized complex system into four groups by their characteristics: self-organization criticality (SOC), self-organization, complex adaptive system (CAS), and cellular automata (CA). This dissertation builds upon the framework of innovation occurring within a complex adaptive system (CAS).

2.2.1 Complexity Portrayal at the Front End

Although the entire innovation process is complex, much of the innovation literature emphasized that the pre-development phase is the most critical and complex step. Moreover, the FFE literature underlines the importance of managing the FFE as it is essentially considered as an informed strong indicator for product development success or failure. This is because the nature of emerging behaviors in the FFE phase that is not well-structured, chaotic, and experimental (Herstatt & Verworn, 2004; Montoya-Weiss & O'Driscoll, 2000), and therefore to be formularized (Murphy & Kumar, 1997). Thus, the outcomes would be uncertain and, to a certain extent, unpredictable (Koen, et al., 2001). For instance, an ill-developed concept product, even surviving through the FFE phase, could pose certain problems in later phases in the product development process, such as cost of change in product design or specification; furthermore, this could even lead to product development failure (Bacon, Beckman, Mowery, & Wilson, 1994). On the contrary, change of a well-developed concept product, at worst, could only minimally cost the product development (Elmquist & Segrestin, 2007).

Recently, the literature on FFE end has ecologically shifted from organizational level focusing on a broad, integrative view to an individual level focusing on understanding certain behaviors emerging from FFE activities. A great deal of effort has been put forward to qualitatively identify the potential factors to success in the FFE activities. However, this unfortunately turned problematic since certain projects have certain characteristics which in turn require specific treatments. For example, drawing on

12 contemporary innovation literature, Frishammar & Florén (2008b) observed and then classified the potential activities into seventeen success factors. However, these success factors were quite project-specific and therefore may be inapplicable on different projects within different natures of work.

Griffiths-Hemans & Grover (2006) emphasized the importance of intrinsic motivation on an individual level as an implication for the managers. The ideation phase requires intensive knowledge and idea brainstorming across the departments, but this could not be forced; the individual must be willing to participate. Therefore, it requires a work environment that creates a positives impact that can induce personal intrinsic motivation to engage in the ideation response loop. Nevertheless, Griffiths-Hemans & Grover (2006) seemed to neglect the Khurana & Rosenthal (1997) perspective that highlights the importance of the holistic view of the firm, including the cultural context. Khurana & Rosenthal (1997) conducted in-depth case studies of front-end practices in eighteen enterprises across industries in the Unites States and Japan. They argued that a firm needed to integrate business practice and organizational cultural context. However, Khurana & Rosenthal’s (1997) studies heavily methodologically relied on “process” as a unit of analysis. Therefore, it is arguable that Khurana & Rosenthal (1997) paid less attention to understanding the emergent behaviors resulting from an individual engaging in FFE activities.

2.2.2 Managing the Fuzziness at the Front End

The centrality of the discussion of recent literature on the complex nature in the FFE phase is information processing. Activities in the FFE phase heavily rely on processing of information which is generated, shared, and exchanged among individuals. An organization that can cope with this complex, uncertain, and chaotic nature of FFE activities will be potentially successful in the entire innovation process (Cooper, 1988, 1998; Dwyer & Mellor, 1991; Griffin, 2010; Koen, et al., 2001; McGuinness & Conway, 1989; Miller & Morris, 1999; Todd, Bessant, & Pavitt, 2009). Khurana & Rosenthal (1997) describe the FFE phase as a “crossroad of complex information process” with

13 uncertainty under the organizational context. Taking on (Khurana & Rosenthal, 1997)’s view, it is arguable that the complexity is in fact not only from information processing, but also the emerging behaviors of the people who bring in diverse ideas. In addition, FFE phase could benefit from individuals with different, but related, disciplines (Baker, Green, & Bean, 1985; Geschka, 1983; Rochford, 1991; Rubenstein, 1994; Song & Parry, 1997).

Figure 1 The Complexity at the Front End of Innovation Modified from Deppe et al. (2002), Herstatt & Verworn (2004), and von Hippel (1993)

The innovation process especially at the front end is the most challenging phase because this part of the process is mired in the fuzziness of high uncertainty, little information, and influence, as depicted in figure 1. Herstatt & Verworn (2004) asserted that the primary activities in FFE are inter-connected among the idea generation and assessment and concept development and product planning that is carried out with very limited information available at the time. This is often depicted as a linear process, and therefore this could be misleading since in reality individual’s informational behaviors during the FFE are greatly emergent and dynamic. In other words, to facilitate the FFE activities, it

14 requires a mild disordering (Miner, Bassoff, & Moorman, 2001; Nonaka, 1991) and relaxing control (Amabile, 1997), allowing self-organizing and self-directing mechanisms. Moreover, another complex characteristic in FFE is a feed-forward mechanism allowing the system to discover ideas and innovate. From a project management perspective, the feed-forward is different from feedback in term of its goal. While a feed-forward mechanism drives the system to discover and forecast potential new ideas, feedback mechanisms prove and actualize the ideas (Tonchia, 2008). Feed- forward and feedback mechanisms can greatly benefit from certain well-designed social media software such as social network applications that are functionally useful and mechanically stimulate innovative ideas (Reinhardt, Wiener, & Amberg, 2010).

2.2.2.1 Process-Oriented Approaches

The literature pertaining to managing the FFE shows that many practitioners and academic researchers have attempted to employ a structural process aspect to approach and simplify the fuzziness at the front end of innovation. In this regard, it was believed that FFE could be structurally viewed, but certain characteristics of FFE (e.g. uncertainty, non-linearity, etc.) visually obscured the structure of the activities (Kim & Wilemon, 2002b).

Cooper and his colleagues constructed a Stage-Gate model based on his multiple empirical studies on both failures and successes of new product developments at the front end activities (Cooper, 1985; Cooper, 1988; Cooper & Kleinschmidt, 1987; Cooper & Kleinschmidt, 1993, 1994). Cooper argued that robust ideas had to be proven by marketing assessments through various stages before developing a product, hence the blockbuster products; the most robust ideas with highly promising marketing concept survived. However, Cooper’s Stage-Gate model is only applicable to the case of product development conceived in incremental innovation climate where technology and market were well-understood. In the case of radical innovation, the technology is just emerging, and the market is not maturely reflecting product’s commercializability, therefore such

15 radical innovative ideas may not survive as they are traversing through “the gates.” In sum, Cooper’s Stage-Gate model does not handle radical innovations accommodate well.

Similary, Khurana & Rosenthal (1998) developed a formulation of pre-product development that partly shared a marketing perspective with Cooper. Just like Cooper, Khurana & Rosenthal (1998) did not consider emergent behaviors; Khurana & Rosenthal (1998) emphasized the importance of qualitative idea assessment, nourishing communication, and sharing the vision in a holistic manner. They proposed two approaches to deal with the fuzziness at the front end of product development: formal process and organizational culture. Besides Cooper and Khurana & Rosenthal, there were many others who examined the structure and the process in the pre-product development. Smith & Herbein (1999) studied customized Stage-Gate model, which increased the efficiency of idea screening, based on research at Alcoa and AlliedSignal. Later, Koen, et al. (2001) argued that there was a lack of common understanding of FFE activities, so they offered an ecological common vocabulary to clarify the fuzziness at the front-end of innovation. However, the proposed vocabulary was theoretically weak due to a lack of a theoretical foundation.

2.2.2.2 Apprehending Emergent Behaviors

Nobelius & Trygg (2002) criticized that most innovation studies investigating the FFE in the 1990’s were tackling an impossible mission by trying to develop an universal and optimal FFE model to accommodate different projects which had different characteristics. Nobelius & Trygg (2002) concluded that there was a need for managerial flexibility by developing multiple FFE routes based on different project characteristics. However, a shift of innovation studies may be seen in Kim & Wilemon (2002a)’s work. Kim & Wilemon (2002a) suggested strategies to cope with FFE by apprehending the sources of the FFE ambiguity. This was the first time that a study was trying to understand the behaviors of the individual who made decisions on the screening process. Moreover, Kim & Wilemon (2002a) stressed the importance of having an information system to support FFE activities. Especially in radical innovation, the information system

16 became a critical capital for an individual to seek and capture relevant information, and evaluate such information immediately. In this regard, information technology could be very useful for communication, collaboration, and information processing.

2.3 Importance of Information Technology on Innovation Process

Traditional research in information systems emphasizes that they needed to address the merit of information technology that could add value into businesses. Much of the contemporary literature on information systems refer to information technology as a tool for business competitiveness coupled with a great variety of frameworks. In response to the above, Bakos & Treacy (1986) developed normative models classifying the literature upon the impact of IT toward an organization: corporate strategy, internal strategy, and competitive strategy. However, the literature suggests that improvement on only internal strategy could in turn positively affect the quality of corporate and competitive strategies as time progresses.

Inspired by previous work building on the resource-based view (Bharadwaj, 2000; Peppard & Ward, 2004; Sambamurthy, Bharadwaj, & Grover, 2003; Wade & Hulland, 2004), Tarafdar & Gordon (2007) explored the impact of information system competencies toward organizational innovation in US-based healthcare firms. They proposed six information system competencies that positively affected process innovation; their six information system competencies were knowledge management, collaboration, project management, ambidexterity, IT/Innovation governance, and business-information system linkages. However, individual information system competencies could not be singled out because they tended to overlap one another.

The main activities in the FFE phase are communication (among individuals and/or across groups) and information processing (searching, exchanging, sharing, etc.). Failing to do well in these activities could lead to a bottle-neck effect at the front end. Therefore, IT has been brought into the context in order to facilitate and, to a certain extent, stimulate the innovation at the front end (Koen, et al., 2001). Kim & Wilemon (2002a)

17 noted that a reliable information system can systematically reduce information uncertainty and fuzziness, and information collected in the system should consist of all the aspects of a firm and its competitors. Besides reducing such ambiguity, Kim & Wilemon (2002a) accentuated that an effective information system can help individuals search for information faster, hence increasing the efficiency of information processing. In this regard, Kim & Wilemon (2002a)’s view of information system is comparable to Tarafdar & Gordon (2007)’s six information system competencies.

Likewise, Kleinschmidt, De Brentani, & Salomo (2010) studied information processing and the firm environment in global new product development. They found that IT- communication strength and the commitment components of the firm’s internal environment were empirically proven essential. Kleinschmidt, et al. (2010) asserted that innovation in fact relies on information processing activities, especially in a global market. Moreover, they imply that the relationships among the firm’s internal environment, organizational information processing competency, and the performance impact on global new product development are complex.

All in all, although the literature emphasizes the importance of information technology as an innovation enabler, those articles did not focus on investigating the phenomenon on the individual level. In this regard, the literature treated innovation transactions at the individual level as a black box, resulting in the researchers missing out on an opportunity to understand the socio-technical interaction between the individual and the information technology. Moreover, the literature above did not specifically articulate the information technology in operational details, hence another black box in the literature.

In an info-organizational perspective, dealing with individuals and information in order to overcome the early FFE phase have demonstrated that FFE “is a crossroad of complex information processing, tacit knowledge, conflicting organizational pressures, and considerable uncertainty” (Khurana & Rosenthal, 1997, cited in Frishammar & Florén (2008a)). This, in turn, contributes to other activities in the late FFE phase such as generating ideas and conceptualizing development schemes (Cooper, 1990; Glen, 1990),

18 collecting information, and filtering ideas (Crawford, 1980). March (1991) argues that successfully managing the FFE phase is concerned with exploring and capturing information. Therefore, a tool that facilitates and, thus, stimulates sharing/transferring/exchanging the information in the FFE phase is not an option, but a necessity. In addition, some companies have already used computer-aided systems to help pipeline the ideas fed to ideation in the FFE phase.

2.4 Social Media Software Facilitating Innovation

The literature on social media software supporting innovative work in a corporate environment may be divided into two groups. First, contemporary work takes on utilitarian view of adopting the social media software technology for the firm’s performance and productivity in a big picture. For example, Boeddrich (2004) gave an example of a successful case of implementing in-house social media software which helped Wella A.G. boost its innovativeness. Malhotra et al. (2001) investigated a breakthrough case of Boeing-Rocketdyne’s radical innovation using computer-mediated collaborative technology, resulting in reducing the cost of a rocket engine by 10,000% and commercializing the rocket engine 1,000% faster than conventional collaboration.

The second wave of the literature seems to be moving toward a humanitarian perspective on which social software application is built. In this regard, social media serves as a platform for social software on which social interactions are carried out. These social interactions are facilitated by social software. The power of social software itself is from the architecture of participation of the individuals connected through distributed social networks. Much of the literature emphasizes self-organizing and user-centric content generation which were highly envisioned in knowledge management science in the 1990’s (Hansen, Nohria, & Tierney, 1999). Building on the discussions in the previous Section, it is arguable that social software, by using the Web 2.0 features, would be able to solve classic issues in knowledge management research7 as the social software

7 The classic issues in knowledge management are (1) the complex and tactic nature of certain knowledge that could not be carried out easily (Hansen, 2002; Hansen, et al., 1999; Polany, 1966a), (2) the intrinsic incentives to motivate people to extract the tacit knowledge and share it (von Kortzfleisch & Mergel, 2002), and (3) the assumption that

19 applications can extract the tacit knowledge and potential innovative knowledge from the individual.

2.4.1 Social Media at Large

To avoid confusion among the terminologies, it is important to clarify and differentiate the terms that have interchangeably been associated with one another: social media, social software, and Web 2.0. Social media serves as a space for social interactions whereas social software is regarded as a range of software systems that enable humans to share and exchange data. Social software is different from legacy software in philosophical foundation: While legacy software system is built to last , social software is built to change . Building on the concepts of social media, Web 2.0 is specialized web- based social software which supports information sharing and collaboration with user- centered design. However, Web 2.0 is more a concept rather than a technology shift.

2.4.1.1 Web 2.0

The world has already undergone making use of Web 2.0 applications, and it becomes a sensation as numerous active subscribers actively participate on hundreds of those applications. The number of participants Web 2.0 applications is skyrocketing, and the number of transactions over those web applications is tremendous. Web 2.0, officially coined in 2004 by Dale Dougherty, vice-president of O’Reilly Media Inc., is an emergent perspective of the combination of technologies (O’Reilly, 2007) that enable web sites to be more collaborative. In this regard, Web 2.0 is considered as a phenomenon rather than an emerging technology (Cooper, 2007). In addition, Web 2.0 technologies are socially based tools and systems which can be referred to collectively as social software (McLoughlin & Lee, 2007).

people were actually looking for less systematic way to extract and then share the knowledge (Davenport & Prusak, 1998).

20 Although there are multiple definitions of the term Web 2.0, the often cited definition is given to Tim O’Reilly. That is, Web 2.0 is “the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an ‘architecture of participation,’ and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences” (O’Reilly, 2005, p. 17).

Defined as an architecture of participation (O’Reilly, 2005), Web 2.0 is powerful when put into use as collaborative tools. McAfee (2006) points out the features and techniques embedded in Web 2.0 website: SLATES (Search, Link, Authoring, Tags, Extensions, and Signals). Search represents a mean of information finding through available contents given by a set of specific meaningful key words. Links connects information together into meaningful information. Authoring represents an ability to create and update content leads to the collaborative work. Tags—folksonomies—is the categorization of content by users without dependence on pre-made categories. Extensions is considered as smart tagging. Signals refers to the use of syndication technology, such as RSS to notify users of content updates.

2.4.1.2 Social Software

According to Suter, Alexander & Kaplan (2005), social software may be identified “as a tool (for augmenting human social and collaborative abilities), as a medium (for facilitating social connection and information interchange), and as an ecology (for enabling a 'system of people, practices, values, and technologies in a particular local environment')" (p. 48). The impact of social software is tremendous due to its rapid adoption as it reached a 50 million person audience in four years (Mejias, 2006). However, based on their nature of function, social software applications may unofficially be categorized in many categories, and they are not a new phenomenon at all since some

21 forms of social software were introduced when the internet became available in the early 1990s (Tepper, 2003) such as internet forums, eLearning, blogs, internet relay chat, and massively multiplayer online games.

2.4.2 Social Media, the Crowd, and the Intelligence

Social media provides users with collaborative environments through a variety of social software and Web 2.0 web sites; therefore, knowledge could collectively be derived from such collaborations among users, and the derived knowledge could be growing at the speed of the accumulative number of participants (Constantinides, 2008; Hoegg, Meckel, Stanoevska-Slabeva, & Martignoni, 2006; Kamel Boulos & Wheeler, 2007; Lee & Lan, 2007; McLoughlin & Lee, 2007; O’Reilly & Battelle, 2009; Rollett, Lux, Strohmaier, & Dosinger, 2007; Schroth, 2007; Zettsu & Kiyoki, 2006).

Recently, some researchers have directed their attentions to an open innovation by using collaborative social software applications (Chesbrough & Appleyard, 2007; Chesbrough, Vanhaverbeke, & West, 2006; Lakhani & von Hippel, 2003). According to Chesbrough (2003), “open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology” (p. xxiv). While open innovation remains a top priority for many companies and researchers, this research effort focuses on innovation that engages enterprise employees. This research does not aim to pursue open innovation, but the innovation within a firm and predicated on its employees.

2.4.2.1 Wisdom of the Crowd

Wisdom of the crowd, which is also known as far-flung genius, distributed intelligence, and innovation communities (Brabham, 2008a), has been around since people learned to express their opinions and publish their personal diaries on the internet (O’Reilly, 2005). Drawing upon numerous case studies across different disciplines, Surowiecki (2004) offers a conclusion that aggregation of information in groups could provide a collective

22 sense making which results in a better decision, hence wisdom of the crowd. Due to the social software’s philosophy and characteristics, social software greatly promotes the wisdom of the crowd as a myriad of Web 2.0 applications enable individuals to rapidly share and exchange information among themselves (Madden & Fox, 2006).

Crowdsourcing, built on the concept of wisdom of the crowd and coined in the June 2006 issue of Wired , refers to a new web–based business model seeking to harness individuals’ ideas captured through diverse networks in an open manner (Howe, 2006). In essence, to accomplish crowdsoucing requires diverse crowds in order to gain more diverse individual ideas (Surowiecki, 2004). So far, many companies have already adopted crowdsourcing model such as Threadless, iStockphoto, and InnoCentive (Brabham, 2008b). In addition, some studies found that most of active and productive members of the crowd are likely to be younger than 30 years of age (Lenhart, Fallows, & Horrigan, 2004; Lenhart & Madden, 2005), especially on certain activities such as blogging (Madden, 2005; Madden & Fox, 2006; Rainie, 2005)

2.4.2.2 Social Media for Collective Intelligence

Collective intelligence, also known as wisdom of the crowds (Surowiecki, 2004), innovation community (von Hippel, 1988, 2005), or intelligence amplification (Bush, 1945; Smith, 1994), has long been optimistically anticipating the potential of making use of aggregated intelligence generated by the networked crowds through web technologies. Levy (1997) recognized collective intelligence as a “form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills” (p. 13). Because “no one knows everything, everyone knows something, [and] all knowledge resides in humanity,” communication technology and collaboration are the ultimate tools to capture the wisdom of the crowds (Levy, 1997, p. 13-14). This accentuates the importance of individuals participating in knowledge transactions over an extended human network.

23 Knowledge can be derived from individuals collaborating on certain knowledge-related activities. Lee & Lan (2007) posit that collaborative intelligence is a triangulation constituted by the three pillars: rally knowledge, intellectual cooperation, and collaboration technologies as shown in figure 2. First, rally knowledge refers to the architecture of participation which in turn encourages users to make contribution to the websites or applications that they use (Umeda, 2006). Second, the intellectual cooperation pillar is the most important pillar since it rests on the core philosophy of Web 2.0 (Schroth, 2007). That is, to create dynamic knowledge and collective intelligence (Umeda, 2006) through complex dynamic exchanges among actors across and within multiple hieratical groups (Allee, 2003) on extended social networks (Dyer, 2000). Third, collaborative technologies create an environment that supports and facilitates the work and communication of team members. Wikipedia, for example, supports knowledge authoring and sharing in a co-production manner (Wagner, 2004).

Figure 2 Pillars of Collaborative Intelligence Lee & Lan (2007)

2.4.3 Social Media in Use for Innovation

Nowadays, Web 2.0 has been embraced by online communities; this is manifested by almost hundreds of social software applications having numerous members actively participating and engaging every single second. The power of social media is manifested as it has been implemented and used as innovative tools for R&D and marketing across

24 industries.8 Considering marketing and branding, social media is used to virally advertise on multiple platform devices including portable handheld devices such as smart phones. Besides social media, Web 2.0 applications in particular are employed as marketing research tools as the companies allow customers to submit their comments, reviews, or ideas regarding specific products. So, the companies can turn those customers’ opinions into use for customer satisfaction improvement and R&D purposes.

Social media is also useful for an enterprise’s internal use as a collaborative tool supporting R&D and innovation processes. Before the advent of Web 2.0 technology, many big companies had already developed and deployed their own social software to collaborate for product R&D innovation in the late 1990s (i.e. the case of Boeing- Rocketdyne and Wella A.G.). Since Web 2.0 technology’s foundation lies in the democratization of knowledge and information sharing, Web 2.0 technology is useful in certain applications for supporting collaboration over information-oriented activities such as ideation in the early phase of innovation processes. However, this research aims at exploring the application and deployment of social media for enterprise’s internal use.

Recently, the term Enterprise 2.0 has been coined in order to describe the implementation of tools which are based on the Web 2.0 technology for enterprise’s internal use (Levy, 2009; McAfee, 2006). According to Levy (2009), Enterprise 2.0 is similar to Intranet. Whereas the Intranet is the networking technology built upon the Internet concept for

8 Social media has been used in marketing space and customer satisfaction & co-development of product design. Marketing in consumer products has become more challenging and complex. Consumers are exposed to a variety of digital communications and technologies. It is necessary for companies to conceive marketing campaigns to cover all the channels in order to gain customers’ attention. Therefore, it is believed that Web 2.0 provides a range of platform for a new generation of marketing, which is made possible by communication technology (Cooke & Buckley, 2008; Cooley, 2007). So far, many consumer companies have already turned social media into a tool for customer satisfaction and product design and development. Also, the concept of openness based on Web 2.0’s philosophy enables customers to discuss over the product directly with the company (Connolly, 2007). Such discussions over the products and services provided by customers are digested and used as marketing research information, which is fed into the production development units (Woffington, 2006). Therefore, customers virtually participate in the product designs through a crowdsourcing channel; this innovation method, empowered by social software, is radically different from traditional product development, which is solely conducted by the R&D unit of the company (S.-H. Lee, DeWester, & Park, 2008). Some examples are provided by (Cooke & Buckley, 2008)’s marketing research: Lego allows online customers to interactively submit their Lego model ideas, and then rewards those customers whose ideas have commercializability. Dell allows online visitors to build their own desktop and laptop computers, and the visitors can even buy the computers that they build. Peugeot encourages people to suggest car designs. The selected winners had their model made and exhibited at Peugoet’s marketing events (J Bughin, Chui, & Johnson, 2008). This resulted in millions of visitors viewing Peugoet’s website.

25 corporate use, the Enterprise 2.0 is the social media application built upon the Web 2.0 concept for corporate use.

There are reports that a number of top executive managers (i.e. CIOs, CTOs) of leading companies are interested in the Web 2.0 technology on certain features (i.e. collective intelligence) (Hinchcliffe, 2007b). Forester Research reported that 106 out of 119 CIOs of the companies with at least 500 workers have already undergone using of the Web 2.0 technologies such as RSS, blog, Wikis, social networking, and podcast (Framington, 2007).

Many innovative companies have already adopted Wikis 9 and blogging. For instance, Motorola holds more than 2,000 Wiki sites and 2,700 blogs (Scarff, 2006). Besides Wikis and blogs, IBM implemented a system, based on Wikis’ content co-production concept, running on Linux that allows IBM people all over the world to improve and enhance IBM software code in order to make commercializable new software applications (Bughin, Chui, & Johnson, 2008). In this regard, IBM and Motorola are considered some of the first movers domesticating Web 2.0 technology. Moreover, Northwestern Mutual, Procter & Gamble, Ziba, Ford Motors, Nike, Milestone Group, GM, Pepsi, and XM Radio have already followed IBM and Motorola’s success by adopting Web 2.0 and then implementing Enterprise 2.0 accordingly (Hinchcliffe, 2007a; Hoover, 2007; Scarff, 2006; Spanbauer, 2006). Despite the growing number of companies using some combination of Web 2.0 technologies, little has been documented about the underlying success factors of various approaches.

2.4.4 Web 2.0 Cultures and Information Security Practice and Policy

Traditional information system literature recognizes risks pertaining to information security and information privacy on individual and organizational levels. These concerns have become the most critically ethical issues in the age of information (Smith, Milberg,

9 Wiki Engine is among the heavily cited Web 2.0 applications as a significant collaborative knowledge constructive phenomenon that benefits from harnessing wisdom of the crowd (van Dijck & Nieborg, 2009).

26 & Burke, 1996). Although Web 2.0 technology’s usefulness lies in democratization of knowledge and liberalization of information, this also introduces a form of electronic threats to the individual and the firm.

Much of the literature suggests such concerns revolve around organizational information security and privacy policies, instead of customizing the technology. Drawing from previous researchers on information security policies, Baskerville & Siponen (2002) argued that, since today’s organizations were increasingly emergent, basic information security policies and standards may not be able to keep up with this dynamic. Thus, it is necessary to conceive an information security meta-policy, a policy for making a policy, to cope with ever-changing the nature of organizational dynamics. In this regards, Baskerville & Siponen (2002) stress the important of abstracting the policies in a very high level.

Vroom & von Solms (2004) studied employees’ information security behavioral compliance, and they found that the root of the issue was from employees’ neglect on organizational information security policies. Vroom & von Solms (2004) suggested that imposing information security policies on employees was ineffective when compared to using informal approach to culturally change employees’ awareness over the information security risks and problems. Siponen & Vance (2010) conducted an empirical study on employee information systems security policy violations. Siponen & Vance (2010)’s conclusion was quite similar to Vroom & von Solms (2004)’s suggestion: developing moral consciousness on information security cognitively was more effective than imposing punishment or treats of breaching the policies.

Information security becomes a critical issue for companies seeking to develop competitive advantage through innovation and the protection of intellectual property. However, the literature responding to the information security and privacy for corporate use has been underdeveloped.

27 2.5 Theoretical Orientations

The complex adaptive systems concept is the main theoretical foundation of this study. However, this research also employs relevant theories to meaningfully complement the study’s data collection, interpretation, and analysis. Four complementary theories—social capital, the intelligence and organizational innovation framework, knowledge management, and socio-technical systems—are specifically employed under the umbrella of the complex adaptive systems environment in order to articulate the dynamic and complex characteristics of the social media technology and the information processing activities at the front end of innovation. Additionally, the social-technical systems perspective provides a theory that functions as an adhesive bonding all the theories together in order to enable the researcher to explore how an enterprise domesticates and accommodates social software for supporting innovative work. The relevance of these four complementary theories is shown in table 1, and the phenomenon studies and theory involved are likewise presented in figure 3.

Theoretical Foundations Relevance Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) Complex, self-adaptive, dynamic nature is applied to emerging demeanors Social Capital Theories (SC) Favorable conditions enourage individual motivations: psycho- technological link: trust Intelligence and Organizational Individual intelligence can be transferred to organizational Innovation Framework (IOIF) innovation Knowledge Management Theories (KM) Sustainable approach and motivation lead to knowledge-related effort Socio-Technical Systems (STS) Optimizing social and technical aspects results in a successful system design

Table 1 Theoretical Foundations and Relevance

28 Phenomenon Studied Theoretical Involvement t = 0 At the outset, it is believed that individuals keep their tacit knowledge to themselves [KM]. The individuals psychologically stay within their own comfort zones.

t = 1 Social media can help create favorable conditions [STS]. Favorable conditions refer to trust factors [SC]. With trust factors, the individuals change their behaviors [CAS], expend their comfort zone, and are willing to communicate, exchange ideas, and collaborate with one another [KM]. These collective actions intellectually lead to innovation propensity [IOI].

t = 2, 3, 4,…, n The collective actions carried out by the individuals [CAS] are captured by using social media [KM][STS] and are transferred to support organizational innovation propensity [IOI] under favorable conditions [SC].

[CAS] = Complex Adaptive Systems [SC] = Social Capital Theories [IOI] = Intelligence and Organizational Innovation Framework [KM] = Knowledge Management Theories [STS] = Socio-Technical Systems

Figure 3 Phenomenon Studied and Theoretical Involvement

29 2.5.1 Complex Adaptive Systems

2.5.1.1 Organization as Complex Adaptive System

An organization can be considered an adaptive, living social organism that fundamentally results from the complex interplay among people, processes, and cultural constituents. As time progresses, the organization becomes more complex due to the behaviorally accumulative dynamics of the interplay.

Complexity has long been one of the central foci of organization studies (Anderson, 1999; Ashby, 1968; Burnes, 2005; Katz & Kahn, 1978; Maguire, McKelvey, Mirabeau, & Oztas, 2006). Pioneering studies of complexity theory in organizational context, Thomson (1967) explained that a complex organization is comprised of a collection of independent parts working in a larger environment. Likewise, contemporary organization work described a complex organization as built on a number of subsystems and actors within an organization, which simultaneously interact with each other in different dimensions (Daft, 1992; Scott, 1992; Christopher, 1996). From a design perspective, complexity is characterized for an organization in a multidimentional fashion such as technology, management, and environment (Galbraith, 1982). Also, organization management literature has recognized and paid great attention to the problems of designing, coordinating, and managing complexity (Ethiraj & Levinthal, 2004).

Ethiraj & Levinthal (2004) developed a model to investigate the dynamics of innovation and performance in complex systems on an organizational level. They argued that decomposing innovation complexity within a system may benefit system designers, for they could better reduce mistakes on integrating the system. Nevertheless, excessively refining modules could be unproductive and lead to performance issues. This implies that organization designers could not avoid ambiguity in design since such ambiguity serves as space for emergent behaviors. However, Ethiraj & Levinthal (2004)’s model seems legitimate only when applied to middle to very large systems such as large firms with a well-organized division of work within.

30 Dougherty (2008) examined organization designs and found conflicts in principle between social constraint and social action in organizational designs, which led to complication in adopting innovation. She argued that innovation, in principle, relaxed social order in origination (e.g. control, management) in order to let employee’s innovative behavior emerge, hence fostering pro-social actions. On the contrary, social constraints tended to draw a hard line between work and workers; in this regard, social constraints were necessary to preserve organizational order and culture that directed individuals toward the shared vision against externality such as competitor and market forces. Therefore, she forged alternate construction principles based on the mutual constitution of constraint and action. However, her principal seems to constitute a universal solution for firms which have different characteristic and culture based on the nature of work. Although Dougherty (2008) invited practitioners and theorists to test her framework, it appears up-front unrealistic and not robust. In addition, another stream of literature on management recognized supply-chain network as a complex adaptive system as well; however, the controversy was that management discipline conventionally was focused to suppress the complexity, and hence missing opportunity to benefit from emerging behaviors 10 .

2.5.1.2 Innovation as Complexity

Innovation processes are complex in nature. This is due to the combination of interactions (Brown & Eisenhardt, 1997; Dougherty, 1992; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995) emerging from a number of multi-actors in different groups across an organization (van de Ven, 1986) and the network of communities of practice (Hargadon & Sutton, 1997). This complexity in innovation becomes noticeable when the innovation processes and

10 Another stream of much recent literature on management recognized supply-chain network as a complex adaptive system (Pathak, Day, Nair, Sawaya, & Kristal, 2007; Petrick & Pogrebnyakov, 2009; Surana, Kumara, Greaves, & Raghavan, 2005). A supply network refers to a collection of interconnected firms which hold assorted heterogeneous knowledge and manufacturing capability (Petrick & Pogrebnyakov, 2009). The supply network’s complex emergent behaviors manifest in a way that each individual entity within the network is simultaneously responding to change in the environment in a co-evolving, but unpredictable, manner (Choi, Dooley, & Rungtusanatham, 2001; Pathak, et al., 2007; Surana, et al., 2005). As much as innovation in supply-chain network attracts tremendous attention from supply- chain management discipline, Choi, et al. (2001) cautiously advocated that managing supply-chain network in conventional fashion could fail, for such conventional management could prevent the network from growing, and also prevent innovative behavior from emerging.

31 activities in early phases are ongoing as adapting (Axelrod & Cohen, 2001) and relational (Boisot & Child, 1999). Moreover, complexity describes the non-linear nature of innovation (Maruyama, 1963; Senge, 1990), especially during the course of phase transitions (Chiles, Bluedorn, & Gupta, 2007; Lichtenstein, Carter, Dooley, & Gartner, 2007; Plowman, et al., 2007) resulting from a feedback loop (Maruyama, 1963; Masuch, 1985).

Taking on the management perspective, some studies on FFE characteristics categorized recursive mechanism into feedback and feed-forward loops (Schroeder, Van de Ven, Scudder, & Polley, 1989). Tonchia (2008) argued that, whereas feed-forward mechanism led the system to discover potential new ideas in forecast manner, the feedback loop mechanism actualized the ideas in evaluative manner. However, feedback and feed- forward loops could be informatively and communicatively complemented by each other (Fricker, Gorschek, & Glinz, 2008; Jim, 2008) as illustrated in figure 4. By circulating information through feedback and feed-forward mechanisms, all the individuals in a project will stay updated on the project. This will finally help them to share and exchange ideas, hence stimulating innovation. In addition, feedback and feed-forward mechanisms are found in Web 2.0’s social tagging for organizing knowledge (Panke & Gaiser, 2009).

Figure 4 Feedback and Feed-forward Loops (Fricker, et al., 2008)

32 Besides, the complexity literature addresses the issues emerging from time-pace and temporal coordination. Time-pace asynchrony (Ancona & Chong, 1996; Casti, 1994; Gell-Mann, 1995) and temporal coordination among multiple actors (Brown & Eisenhardt, 1997, 1998) reflect dynamics and non-linearity by multiple actors participating innovation work. For instance, differences in rhythms and asynchronous time-pace could lead to negative optimality of carrying out innovation processes (Brown & Eisenhardt, 1997; Chiles, et al., 2007; Garud & Nayyar, 1994; Lachmann, 1976). This is critical because engagements and actions of all the actors contribute to innovation processes and outcomes as a whole before the “serendipity moment” arrives (Cunha, 2004; Dew, 2009; Irvine & Martin, 1984; Usher, 1954). Interestingly, Emirbayer & Mische (1998), taking on Mead & Murphy (1932)’s view, mentioned that any – even serendipity – moment in the present is influenced by the memory from past and the anticipation of the future. This remark emphasizes the chronological paradox influenced by interplay among time-pace rhythms and temporal asynchrony, collaboration among actors, and organizational memory. Thus capturing the ideas and beliefs of employees at any single appoint in time improves the active memory of the firm and thus heightens likelihood of a “serendipity moment.”

All things considered, complexity was at the heart of conducting the current research. The approach to complexity in FFE is not to destabilize the uncertainty or ambiguous characteristics of the activities and information processing within, but to absorb and harness the complexity which is finally turned into an intermediate persistence feeding to innovation process at the front end with help from Web 2.0 technology as a tool. With an extra large array of the applications available over the internet (see table 1), Web 2.0 technology answers to all the aspects of information processing and collaboration requirements in order to facilitate and stimulate FFE activities and innovation process as a whole. However, this anticipation is quite optimistic. Web 2.0 technology is emerging; perhaps, it is considered too wild for corporate use where a variety of controls are required. Therefore, it needs a comprehensive understanding of the socio-technological effects of what Web 2.0 applications are capable of before “putting” the tools into a good use.

33 2.5.2 Social Capital Theory

According to Bourdieu (1986), the central premise of social capital theory is that networks of relationships collectively constitute resources that enable the members to have access to collective resources (e.g., knowledge, information , etc.). The capital is embedded within the network provided by the members who feel obligated to the relationship due to gratitude, respect, and friendship (Bourdieu, 1986). That is, the valuable resources are established in the network through collective actions whether the network has a weak tie (Granovetter, 1973) or a strong tie (Bourdieu, 1986; Burt, 1995; D'Aveni & Kesner, 1993). In an organizational context, innovation results from transforming accumulative social capital via collective exchanges of the respective social capital of individuals. In this regard, the social aspect essentially enhances cross-team efficacy (Rosenthal, 1996), facilitates information and resource exchanges across groups to effect product innovation (Gabbay & Zuckerman, 1998; Hansen, 1998; Tsai & Ghoshal, 1998), and helps network members to draw on their knowledge in the production of intellectual capital (Hargadon & Sutton, 1997; Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998).

Building on Bourdieu’s (1986) assumption that social capital was founded in relationship through social transactional exchanges, Nahapiet & Ghoshal (1998) argued that the individuals’ intellectual capitals contribute to an organization’s social capital via combination and exchange of intellectual capital through structural, cognitive, and relational dimension. This, in turn, finally results in creating new intellectual capital 11 , as shown in figure 5. In order to generate the new capital, it requires an organization must (1) facilitate individuals to codify their expertise and tacit knowledge (Kogut & Zander, 1993, 1996; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995; Spender, 1996), (2) invent cooperative mechanisms that make it possible for an individual and functional expertise to be codified and distributed (Conner & Prahalad, 1996; Kogut & Zander, 1992; Zander & Kogut, 1995), and (3) transfer organizations into organic communities (Glynn & Webster, 1993; Kogut & Zander, 1992, 1996).

11 “New intellectual capital” in this context is considered as an initial condition contributing to innovation.

34 Social capital also functions as a techno-psychological platform where the innovative work links to the social software concept. Glynn & Webster (1993) found positive links among intrinsic motivation, cognitive playfulness, and innovation intentions in adults. These psychological qualities are embedded in social software’s features. Therefore, by deploying social software in an enterprise, knowledge workers could carry out their innovative thinking through social software applications on Web 2.0 platforms as many recent studies show that information technology and social software over the internet positively influence formation of social capital (Anderson, 2008; Burke, Marlow, & Lento, 2010; Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007; Gaudeul & Peroni, 2010; Gentzkow & Shapiro, 2010; Hampton, 2002; Hampton & Wellman, 2003; Kavanaugh, Carroll, Rosson, Zin, & Reese, 2005; Steinfield, Ellison, & Lampe, 2008; Zhang, Johnson, Seltzer, & Bichard, 2010).

Access to parties for combing/exchanging intellectual capital

Anticipation of value through combing/ Relational Social Capital exchanging intellectual New intellectual capital Trust capital created through Norms combinations and Obligation exchanges Identification Motivation to combine and exchange intellectual capital

Combination capability

Figure 5 Social Capital in the Creation of New Intellectual Capital Adapted from Nahapiet & Ghoshal (1998)

35 Social capital is usually operationalized in three main dimensions: the structural dimension, the cognitive dimension, and the relational dimension. The structural dimension examines social network relationships influenced by the characteristics of networks including the nodes and the ties within and between them. On the other hand, the relational dimension is interested in the psychological assets that are part and parcel of relationships such as trust and norms. The cognitive dimension seeks understanding based on shared, communal, and codified symbolic representations such as languages, symbols, etc. Though all three dimensions of social capital are important, the present study emphasizes the trust dimension as a primary factor affecting collaboration. Trust was employed to articulate techno-psychological links between an individual’s intrinsic motivations associated with trust and the characteristics of social software as a tool for supporting innovative work. Trust was examined because it could potentially affect network members’ motivations and willingness to share; thus, knowledge creation and transfer occurs (Dodgson, 1993; Doz, 1996) when the members perceive minimal risk of opportunism on the part of others. It is at this point that trust is established (Inkpen & Tsang, 2005).

2.5.2.1 Institutional-Based Trust

Institutional-based trust refers to trust in networks within an organization that is derived from the fact that “an organization is a member of the network signifying to other members that the former should be trustworthy” (Inkpen & Tsang, 2005). Also known as system trust, institutional-based trust relies on the idea that there are favorable pre- existing conditions that will definitely be conducive to situational success as people continue to buy into a product/mission, carry out related tasks, and allow favorable conditions to come to pass. Lewis & Weigert (1985), Luhmann (1979), Shapiro (1987), and McKnight & Chervany (2001) have applied and extended the notion of “favorable conditions” to new media such as the Internet and other non-face-to-face collaborative environments. In this regard, trust plays an indispensable role in creating and maintaining successful ubiquitous computing environments (Valacich, 2003), and therefore contributes to capital formation on the enterprise social media platform.

36 2.5.2.2 Trust in the Absence of Face-to-Face Communication

Trust is an essential component of social constructs (Searle, 1995). A large body of literature on online collaboration places importance on trust, as it provides a foundation for collaboration (Komiak & Benbasat, 2004; Kramer, 1999; Rousseau, Sitkin, Burt, & Camerer, 1998; Whitener, Brodt, Korsgaard, & Werner, 1998) and for the success of virtual teams (Feng, Lazar, & Preece, 2004; Jarvenpaa, Knoll, & Leidner, 1998; Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1999; Leonardi, Nanetti, & Putnam, 1993; Sarker & Valacich, 2003; Schweers Cook, 2005; Whitworth & De Moor, 2003). In this regard, collaboration and collaborative relationships require a considerable investment in trust on the part of the members who are—ideally—motivated to fulfill their responsibilities for the sake of the whole (Hattori & Lapidus, 2004). Trust is an issue in virtual communication especially given the increasing complexity of virtual information platforms. In fact, telecommunication technologies gave rise to numerous self-organizing forms of virtual communities and virtual teams whose members are geographically dispersed. Often, members of virtual teams communicate through asynchronous technologies in the absence of face-to-face interactions (Jarvenpaa, et al., 1998; Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1998; Jarvenpaa, Shaw, & Staples, 2004). Therefore, trust is an indispensable factor in any cohesive team.

2.5.3 Creativity and Innovation

Intelligence, creativity, and innovation are among the terms that have interchangeably been used in the literature in organizational innovation. It is important to understand their definitions, functions, distinctions, and relations as they are triangularly interconnected as illustrated in Glynn (1996)’s intelligence and organizational innovation framework, depicted in figure 5. Despite the differences among these three terms, the discussion in this Section focuses only on the aspect of innovation.

37 2.5.3.1 The Notions and the Relation

Angle (1989) argued that innovation and creativity have a set of overlapping characteristics. Amabile et al. (1996) made a distinctive remark that innovation is made possible by creative ideas which are driven by individual intelligence; however, creativity—while necessary—alone is not a satisfactory condition to initialize innovation. Moreover, creativity is a generation of new and useful ideas on an individual level, but innovation refers to the process in that ideas are captured, productized (or implemented), and finally commercialized (Amabile, Conti, Coon, Lazenby, & Herron, 1996). That is, an individual works on his/her creativity and situational context to generate ideas that get forwarded into the innovation process. Therefore, creativity is considered as (1) a subset embedded within innovation (Woodman, Sawyer, & Griffin, 1993) and (2) an antecedent of innovation (Glynn, 1996).

The contemporary literature on innovation in social science has grown based on the concerns over organizational productivity, quality assurances, and competitive advantages; therefore enterprises are highly motivated to innovate. According to Glynn (1996), many studies pay attention to discontinuous innovation toward radical innovation 12 (e.g. Dewar & Dutton (1986), Ettlie, Bridges, & O'Keefe (1984), and Nord & Tucker (1987)) since this type of innovation in turn creates disruptive changes (Christensen, 2006; Christensen & Overdorf, 2000) toward organizational intelligence in terms of organizational vitality (Mezias & Glynn, 1993), cognition (Anderson & Tushman, 1990; Tushman & Anderson, 1986; Tushman, Newman, & Romanelli, 1986), mentality (Senge, 1990), and the theories in use (Argyris, 1977). Thus, these key concepts suggest the social nature of social media approach.

12 Radical innovation refers to an innovation with a high market and technical uncertainty as depicted in appendix 5.

38 2.5.3.2 The Factors Influencing Innovation

In the organizational context and work environment was an antecedent of innovation as many studies reveal some important successful organizational characteristics for innovation. For example, structural characteristics of organization with innovation capacity were organic (rather than mechanistic) (Burns & Stalker, 1994) and more integrative (than segmental) (Kanter, 1983). Also, an array of empirical studies showed that work designs affected worker’s ability to innovate.13 However, this discussion on creativity and innovation in this research is directed to the innovation links from the individual perspective, which is driven by intrinsic motivation (see figure 6).

Figure 6 Intelligence and Organizational Innovation Framework Glynn (1996)

13 For example, an array of studies advocated that job flexibilities (cross functional role and autonomy) given to the workers promotes innovation (Amabile, 1988; Amabile & Gryskiewicz, 1987; Andrews & Farris, 1967; Delbecq & Mills, 1985; Pelz & Andrews, 1966).

39 Much of literature on creativity and innovation seems to have arrived at the conclusion that creativity and innovation at work were influenced by individual’s intrinsic motivation and working environment. While individual factors are about a psychological perspective, environmental factors are regarding the art of management (James, Clark, & Cropanzano, 1999). However, a larger body of the literature tends to be concentrated on environmental factors. Drawing from contemporary work, McLean (2005) concluded that the environmental supportive keys for creativity and innovation are organizational encouragement (Amabile, et al., 1996; Angle, 1989; Kanter, 1983), supervisory encouragement (Amabile, 1998; Oldham & Cummings, 1996; Tesluk, et al., 1997), work group encouragement (Ancona & Chong, 1996; Angle, 1989; Feist, 1999; Kanter, 1983), freedom and autonomy (Amabile, 1998), and resources (Amabile, 1998) while the impediment is control (Amabile, 1988; Amabile, 1998; Angle, 1989; Kanter, 1983; Kimberly, 1981; Oldham & Cummings, 1996). The following are some examples of the recent trend in the innovation literature which is moving toward environmental factors.

Bharadwaj & Menon (2000) studied individual and organizational creativity and innovation mechanisms by conducting a survey on hundreds of organizations. They suggested that individual and organizational creativity mechanisms altogether led to organizational innovation performance gain. However, Bharadwaj & Menon (2000) did not pay attention to the interplay/inter-relationship between the individual factors and organizational environment, seemingly to assume that both equally led to the organization performance gained, hence missing an opportunity to capture the insights in the links and the interplay between the individual and organization. Furthermore, their arguments on discussion and implication were less on individual factors and more so on resource-based view of environmental factors.

Taking an intra-organizational evolutionary perspective, Birkinshaw, Hamel, & Mol (2008) developed a framework for generative management innovation, which is currently less understood and under developed. Birkinshaw et al. (2008) argued that, in order to manage the innovation effectively, the style of management innovation itself has to be co-evolving with such innovation activities or changes which were usually unprecedented

40 and unforeseen. In so doing, it requires insight from an institutional perspective, fashion perspective, cultural perspective, and rational perspective. Out of these four perspectives, three of them deal with environmental factors; only relational perspective articulates individual factors. Additionally, what makes Birkinshaw, et al. (2008)’s framework very robust is the fact that Birkinshaw et al. (2008) approached the management innovation in a co-evolutionary manner according to the activities. In this regard, Birkinshaw et al. (2008) recognizes and captures complexity and dynamics in activities in the innovation process, and they later formulate a management innovation framework.

The creativity residing among the individuals can be collectively and accumulatively transformed and transferred into an organizational dynamic. This transition may greatly benefit from Web 2.0 capability. In other words, Web 2.0 technology is able to facilitate the transformation and the transfer mechanism from the individuals outward to the organization such as the case of Wella A.G.’s computer-aided idea management system illustrated in the introduction of this dissertation research.

2.5.4 Knowledge Management Theories

2.5.4.1 Contemporary Organizational KM Research

Much of researchers’ and practitioners’ attention has been focused on contemporary knowledge management (KM) studies in innovative work in an organizational context (Boisot, 1995; Brand, 1998; Carneiro, 2000; Cohen & Levinthal, 1990; Coombs & Hull, 1998; Daghfous & White, 1994; Darroch, 2005; Drongelen, Weerd-Nederhof, & Fisscher, 1996; Hedlund, 1994; Jacky, Sue, & Maxine, 2000; Leonard-Barton, 1998; McAdam, 2000; Nieto, 2003; Scarbrough, 2003; Swan, 1999); these authors introduced the need for adopting KM as a tool to support organizational innovation. However, the major driver of KM success was propelled by economic constraints. As “lean and mean” became prevalent since the 1980’s, the reality is that enterprises were losing accumulated knowledge as they became lean (Piggott, 1997). Therefore, the invented mechanism, KM, was to prevent knowledge loss and to retain the knowledge for the future (Bair, 1997;

41 Piggott, 1997). Information technology advancement, especially an advent of the Internet, brought mixed feelings to an organization because, while an advanced IT accelerates information growth and proliferation (Hibbard, 1997; Mayo, 1998), it also causes disquiet since such information explosions can become overwhelming (Mayo, 1998), hence the need for an effective KM (DiMattia & Oder, 1997) to collect, store, retrieve, and make searchable knowledge or expertise systematically (Sahlin-Andersson & Engwall, 2002).

However, IT alone could not thrive in KM; to successfully deploy KM, a range of receptive organizational culture arrangement is a priori (Bair, 1997; Chase, 1998; Cole- Gomolski, 1997; De Long & Fahey, 2000; Koudsi, 2000; McDermott & O'dell, 2001; Riege, 2005; Warren, 1999). Alavi, Kayworth, & Leidner (2006) examined cultural influence and knowledge management in global information companies. The implication from their study focused on empowering the KM leaders to shape the organization’s knowledge sharing value in order to influence and encourage the employees to engage with KM tools available for them. Thus, KM tool designers crafted the tools to be culturally appealing to the employees who had different knowledge and cultural values. Interestingly, Alavi, et al. (2006) avoid using the term “culture” by exercising the term “value” to articulate the influence of KM toward an organizational culture.

McDermott & O'dell (2001) studied global American companies who did well in knowledge management. McDermott & O'dell7 (2001) argue that an effort to radically change organizational culture just to accommodate KM could be not productive and effective due to findings that those companies did not change their culture to match the KM initiatives. Rather, they built and adapted the KM approach to fit the culture corresponding to business practice. It is arguable that Alavi et al. (2006)’s and McDermott & O'dell (2001)’s studies imply that a company needs KM approaches and tools that are less disruptive to the existing organizational culture. That is, it may be not reasonable to change an organizational culture to deploy KM. Therefore, it is viable to influence the employees’ knowledge “value” in order to adopt and adapt the KM in a way to strengthen the organizational culture and core knowledge value.

42 2.5.4.2 Tacit and Explicit Knowledge Transformation

Although many empirical KM studies place importance on a knowledge repository system,14 the classic argument on knowledge is still that tacit knowledge is not easily captured and stored (Mayo, 1998; McAdam, Mason, & McCrory, 2007; McAfee, 2006; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995; Teece, 2008; Turner & Makhija, 2006). According to Polany, (1966b), Nonaka & Takeuchi (1995), and Borghoff & Pareschi (1997), knowledge can be precisely categorized into tacit and explicit knowledge: while explicit knowledge can be understandingly constructed, easily codified, and captured in several of digestible, tangible forms, tacit knowledge is inexpressible. Moreover, being tacit could lead to difficulties in understanding relations of information and patterns of knowledge (Bellinger, 1996; Borghoff & Pareschi, 1997) since tacit knowledge is responsible for seventy percent of organizational knowledge (McManus & Snyder, 2003).

However, tacit knowledge, although difficult to codify, capture, and transfer, can somehow be manageable by extracting such knowledge from the knowledge workers. Explicit and tacit knowledge are interdependently connected and also complement each other in a certain way (Alavi & Leidner, 2001). This transformation is carried by an individual bringing both tacit and explicit knowledge to their social interactions and communications (Nonaka, 1994; Nonaka & Krogh, 2009; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995; Nonaka, Takeuchi, & Umemoto, 1996). Likewise, Alavi & Leidner (2001) argue that, with sufficient knowledge management, tacit knowledge is somehow capable of being explicated and, therefore, codified. But it requires a good deal of effort to make this transformation possible. From an innovation perspective capturing what an individual knows and then being able to reuse that knowledge is an essential ingredient.

14 Examples of the empirical studies on knowledge repository are found in Ash, 1998; Bassi, 1999; Blake, 1998, 2000; Cole-Gomolski, 1997a, 1997b, 1998; Davis, 2009; DiMattia & Oder, 1997; Finerty, 1997; Hibbard, 1997; Laberis, 1998; LaPlante, 1997; Mayo, 1998; Nerney, 1997; Ostro, 1997; Schmerken, 2004; Symoens, 1998; Watson, 1998; and, Yeh, Chang, & Oyang, 2000.

43 2.5.4.3 Managing Knowledge with Social Media Software

Recent knowledge management literature has adopted social computing approaches. The primary argument is that knowledge management can benefit from certain features of Web 2.0 applications. This is because Web 2.0 technology techno-psychologically fills the gap between the KM system and the knowledge workers. Although the Web 2.0 technology is not quite clearly understood, many researchers are already exploring the usability and the usefulness of the technology for e-learning and knowledge collaboration. This research follows the footstep of the recent KM research trend.

Chatti, Jarke, & Frosch-Wilke (2007) proposed that Web 2.0 technology can leverage knowledge sharing and learning to enhance individual performances on knowledge transactions in a way that certain traditional knowledge management and learning management (LM) have failed. In this regard, they substantiated that “learning and knowledge are social, personal, flexible, dynamic, distributed, ubiquitous, complex and chaotic in nature” (p. 411), and therefore the traditional KM approaches may be less effective.15 However, Chatti et al. (2007)’s discussion is merely on the disadvantages of the previous KM and LM model; they did not elaborate on functional compatibility on KM/LM activities and Web 2.0 features.

Perhaps, Levy (2009)’s study on applying Web 2.0 technology on knowledge management is regarded as the most comprehensive analysis of adopting Web 2.0 technology for improving the knowledge management pursuit. However, Levy (2009) criticized the philosophy of knowledge management and the implement action of Web 2.0 technology for enterprise’s use. First, “the knowledge management world is not mature enough for losing control and moving to altruism without any organizational central guidance” (p. 132). That is, it is still too fast to let free controls over KM tools. Second, although the Web 2.0 concept proves useful for information/knowledge sharing, “the organizational world is much smaller and therefore the rules are different” (p. 132).

15 Therefore, Chatti, et al., (2007) proposed that Web 2.0 technology must be a leading component for future KM and LM.

44 Thus there is a need to understand standards of practice and sensible policy to fill the gaps she mentioned above.

In sum, the objective of this research directly responded to Levy (2009)’s concerns by offering recommendations on the governance policy and on the design. The successful recommendations would be able to guide a company adopter through the confusing concepts of the tool’s deployment and implementation. This research also investigated how tacit knowledge was diffuse and transferred through social network software applications; this investigation was due to the fact that Web 2.0 technology offers psychological comfort factors to the users, so users tend to participate in knowledge transfers via such technology in a psychologically deeper level.

2.5.5 Socio-Technical System (STS)

The socio-technical system is in essence employed to investigate failures in deploying an information system in organizations. Bostrom & Heinen (1977)’s work is perhaps among the most recognizable application of STS as they discovered that organizational behavior problems were caused by inadequate designs which were derived from the designers’ views and frames of references. According to Walker et al. (2007) and Walker et al. (2008), STS has two main principles. First, interactions among social-technical factors construct the conditions which affect organizational efficacy, and the interaction can be linear, non-linear, complex, unpredictable, or a mix of the above. Second, STS theoretically balances either the socio or technical perspective, where a favoring of one of the other could result in failing the system’s performance.

Despite the usefulness of STS principles, some researchers detect conflicts in STS’s principles between (social) humanistic principles (a design to enhance quality of work and life) and (technical) economic objectives (a design to maximize work performance for a better organizational productivity) (Avgerou, Ciborra, & Land, 2004; Land, 2000). Among those studies are organizational transformation (Zardet & Voyant, 2003), group building (Pruijt, 2003), software design (Petrina, 2003), work design and psychological

45 effects (Tummers, Landeweerd, & van Merode, 2002), innovation process studies (Soares, 2002), and knowledge management with social software as an enabler (Patrick & Dotsika, 2007), to name a few 16 .

This research employed STS as the paradigmatic theoretical foundation that held all the research elements (the theories, the methodology, and the findings). STS aspects assisted the researcher to address and articulate socio-technical complication emerging from humans and technological artifacts interacting. For example, domesticating Web 2.0 technology to the workplace creates changes in the organizational cultural and the individual’s working methods.

2.6 Chapter Summary

This chapter provides a discussion of the related research background and theoretical orientation of this research. Complex adaptive systems (CAS), social technical systems (STS), social capital theories (SC), knowledge management theories (KM), and the intelligence and organizational innovation framework (IOI) constitute the theoretical foundation of this research in the following ways. Individuals keep their tacit knowledge to themselves, psychologically staying in their comfort zones. The social aspect helps to create favorable conditions (STS), which in this context are referred to as trust factors (SC). With trust factors, the individuals changed their behaviors (CAS) by expending their comfort; therefore, they were willing to communicate, exchange ideas, and collaborate with one another (KM). These collective actions intellectually lead to innovation propensity (IOIF). The collective actions carried out by the individuals (CAS) are captured by using social media (KM) (STS) and transferred to the organizational innovation propensity (IOI) under favorable conditions (SC).

16 The list of hundreds of research papers is shown at http://www.sociotechnical.org/archive.htm.

46 Chapter 3: Research Design

This chapter discusses the research design and the methodology employed to conduct this dissertation research. Drawn upon research background and the motivation, the research objective was formulated, and sub-questions are generated in response to the objective. This study employed mixed methods, qualitative and quantitative. The course of conducting the study such as data collection, data analysis, and drawing recommendations from the findings were guided by an interpretive epistemological perspective and the selected theories. Regarding data analysis, the research also utilized triangulation to interpret and analyze the data collected in a meaningful manner.

3.1 Research Background and Motivation

Literature shows that the Fuzzy Front End (FFE) is considered critically challenging in the innovation process due to its characteristics and complexity. To harness the complexity in the FFE phase and capture ideas generated, information technology and information systems are not optional, but mandatory. However, adopting a technology to use in an enterprise is not merely about buying and stalling them. Instead, the enterprise has to accommodate the new system with a certain socio-technical environment.

Deployment of an information system impacts an organization, driving changes toward internal organizational process, management, and productivity (Baroudi, 1985; Brynjolfsson & Hitt, 2000; Brynjolfsson & Renshaw, 1997; Gurbaxani & Whang, 1991; Henderson, 1993; Iacovou, Benbasat, & Dexter, 1995; Karimi, Somers, & Bhattacherjee, 2007; Kautz, Madsen, & Nørbjerg, 2007; Milgrom & Roberts, 1990; Orlikowski & Baroudi, 1991; Orlikowski & Robey, 1991; Picot, Reichwald, & Wigand, 2008; Rashid, Wang, & Tan, 2010; Ryssel, 2004; Smith, 1988; Wu, Yeniyurt, Kim, & Cavusgil, 2006). Therefore, domesticating the social media system could result in changes in culture and behaviors in organizational and personal levels. Considering the domestication, social media’s philosophy, which is the technological foundation of Web 2.0, lies in social

47 interaction to support the democratization of knowledge and the liberalization of information of user-generated content (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). Therefore, social software and the Web 2.0 application are built to change and allow individuals to freely produce and consume information (the content) over those applications. On the contrary, legacy systems are built to last in order to provide essential business services (Sommerville, 2004) under very restricted control. In this sense, a legacy information system is also considered as an information system that significantly resists modification and evolution (Brodie & Stonebraker, 1995).

Social media and social software applications are still very emerging and philosophically contradictory to the legacy system. Moreover, the liberalization of information could contribute to uncomfortable factors to the management since it could pose several managerial and security threats to the enterprise such as synchronicity, privacy, security, connectivity, work-life issues (social networking in a work environment), non-systematic controls, information overload, and arbitrary filtering of communication.

In this regard, I posit that FFE activities in an innovation process could be operationalized differently based on the (organizational and individual) culture and the behavior, which are shaped by the deployment of the system (social software and social media). As depicted in table 2, in an information security perspective, an enterprise needs to accommodate the new technological system with policies, standards, and practices in response to strategic, tactic, and operational perspectives of the enterprise. Two working domains (policy and mechanism) are comprised of three layers of three different perspectives (managerial, information policy, and outputs derived the information policy). In this study, I will observe two sets of layers: tactical (comprising of technical information security policy in the designer view, deriving the standard) and operational (comprising of organizational information security policy in the users’ view, deriving de facto practice and deployment).

On policy operationalization domain, strategic managerial perspective response to the top management’s view deals with corporate information security; the output derived from

48 objectifying the corporate information security concerns therefore is the policy. Next, the tactical managerial perspective response to the designer’s view with corporate information security; the output derived from objectifying the technical information security concern therefore is the standard. Note that the term “standard” in this context refers to an in-house standard regarding technical information security policy which is internally deployed and used.

On mechanism operationalization domain, the operational perspective response to the user’s view deals with organizational information security; the output derived from objectifying the organizational information security concerns therefore is the practice and the deployment. As a result, findings that will be obtained will be analyzed through the selected theories with the chosen epistemological perspective in order to formulate recommendations for domesticating and accommodating the system and also offer future research topics in social computing.

Managerial View of Information Policy Output Derived from the Operationalization Perspective (Baskerville & Siponen, 2002) View Domain Strategic Corporate Information Security Policy Policy (top management view) Policy Tactical Technical Information Security Policy Standard

(designer’s view) (including technology and practice) Operational Organizational Information Security Practice and deployment Mechanism Policy (user’s view)

Table 2 Three Different Perspectives on Information Security Working Domain

3.2 Research Objectives and Questions Based on the research motivation in Section 3.1, the objective of this dissertation is to:

“Explore how an enterprise domesticates and accommodates a social media platform to internally support idea generation, brainstorming, and concept development at the front end of the innovation process”

49 The governance includes (1) policy and information security standards and practices and (2) the culture which could promote or impede the communication across groups within the organization. Social media, in this context, refers to platforms ( space ) that interactively create accessibility for two-way dialogue including conversational communications such as blogs, Wikis’, chat rooms, instant messaging systems, and message boards. All of these are pervasive on several media types such as a PC (desktop, laptop, and tablet), smart phone, etc. In addition, this dissertation in essence includes an array of emerging topics related to the objective stated above.

First, this study will investigate the interplay and inter-relatedness between two types of social networking: personal social network (outside the enterprise) and professional social network (peers, groups, and the enterprise). Therefore, there is a possibility that individuals exchange certain information between enterprise networks and personal networks. This could bring benefit to the FFE activities or create a threat toward the organizational privacy, integrity, and confidentiality. Thus, the sub-research questions responding to this concern are:

Research Question 1: Does social media influence individual information search behavior at the FFE of the innovation process? Does the design of the social media platform affect emergent behavior? Do social media tools influence what the individual searches for or how he/she searches for it?

Research Question 2: Can the dynamic information flows and interactions facilitated by social media be adequately captured by more formal KM systems?

Second, human-to-human interaction essentially occurs in co-location places by face-to- face communication in which a real conversation takes place. However, human-to-human interaction via social media takes place electronically. This could raise the issue of trustworthiness among individuals electronically interacting and participating in the social media space. In the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) perspectives, collaboration and communication via electronic

50 medium introduces a concept of place and space (Dourish, 2006; Harrison & Dourish, 1996; Healy, 1996; Wilson & Corey, 2000), while traditional face-to-face communication occurs in a real co-located place. This issue has been known as distributed collaboration on a virtual environment studied in concurrent engineering science (Buttolo, Oboe, & Hannaford; Greenhalgh & Benford, 1995; Kim, Kim, Kim, Kang, & O'Grady, 1998; Li, et al., 2004; Maxfield, Fernando, & Dew, 1995; Maxfield, Fernando, & Dew, 1998; Prasad, Fujun Wang, & Jiati Deng, 1997). This signifies the need to create a space (platform) to facilitate both the individuals communicating and the communication and collaboration. Thus, the sub-research questions responding to this concern are:

Research Question 3: How should social media platforms be designed to reflect business goals and individual needs?

Research Question 4: Can social media platforms leverage individual psychological motivations such as trust?

3.3 Research Epistemology

This dissertation uses an interpretive lens of inquiry and analysis, a mode of research that relies on the basic assumption that human knowledge is acquired by means of social constructions comprising cultural artifacts such as language, consciousness, shared meanings, and documents (Klein & Myers, 2001). The underlying assumption is that meanings are being created as people interact with one another in their respective contexts. According to Klein & Myers (2001), the objective of interpretive research is to construct social theories based on social phenomena. Walsham (1995a, 1995b) argued that underlying contextual conditions are vital for interpretive researchers to pursue in- depth investigations. Certain problems in information sciences research agendas involving interactions between human actors and IT artifacts cannot be resolved by simply collecting the data and analyzing it in terms of statistics. Rather, such problems must be investigated at the critical level of the dynamics and mechanism of the interplay and the relationships among human actors, IT artifacts, and specific settings.

51 In this context, I sought to understand how the use of social software supporting the FFE activities shapes an enterprise and the individuals within, and vice versa . In addition, I employed both descriptive and interpretive lens for my investigation. While descriptive lens was being employed to learn and understand the subjects, interpretive lens was also uses to investigate interactions between humans and artifacts. Interpretivist epistemology informed and guided data collection, data analysis, and the theories in use.

3.4 Research Methods and Instruments

This study will employ mixed methods to capture, explore, investigate, and examine the phenomenon. By using mixed methods, the study approaches the phenomena qualitatively and quantitatively by using a variety of theories and data collection instruments. Although qualitative and quantitative research methods have different dichotomies (Pope & Mays, 1995), as shown in table 3, studies using mixed-method have shown that integration of these traditions within the same study can be seen as complementary to each other (Cook, Campbell, & Day, 1979; Greene & Caracelli, 1997).

Features Qualitative Quantitative Assumptions Reality is socially constructed Social facts have an objective reality Primacy of subject matter Primacy of method Variables are complex, interwoven, and Variables can be identified and difficult to measure relationships measured Emic (insider's point of view) Etic (outside's point of view) Purpose Contextualization Generalizability Interpretation Prediction Understanding actors' perspectives Causal explanations Approach Ends with hypotheses and grounded theory Begins with hypotheses and theories Emergence and portrayal Manipulation and control Researcher as instrument Uses formal instruments Naturalistic Experimentation Inductive Deductive Searches for patterns Component analysis Seeks pluralism, complexity Seeks consensus, the norm Makes minor use of numerical indices Reduces data to numerical indices Descriptive write-up Abstract language in write-up Researcher Role Personal involvement and partiality Detachment and impartiality Empathic understanding Objective portrayal Reasoning & role of theory Generation of theory Testing of theory Strength Validity Reliability

Table 3 Views of Dichotomy between Quantitative and Qualitative Social Science Modified from and various sources

52 In addition, this study will use triangulation to analyze the data collected by using mixed methods. According to Greene, Caracelli, & Graham (1989), triangulation is a mixed method evaluation design for testing the consistency of findings obtained through different instruments. Especially in case studies, triangulation will increase chances to control, or at least assess, some of the threats or multiple causes influencing the results.

3.4.1 Qualitative Interview

According to Kvale (1996), qualitative interviews allow researchers to gain an idea of a situation through each subject’s perspective as told in that subject’s own words; that is, the basic subject matter is not objective data, but consists of meaningful relations to be interpreted with a view to uncovering the meaning of a subject’s experiences. Although questionnaires are a common instrument for drawing structural responses from subjects, researchers who use only static questionnaires may forego an opportunity to collect the kind of rich information that can proceed from qualitative interviewing. In the present study, the interviews were semi-structured, flexible enough to sufficiently explore the focus phenomenon, thus allowing new themes to emerge. The questions were designed to obtain and collect information pertinent to the research questions. In order to make sure that the questions were such as to elicit comprehensive responses, the researcher anticipated possible responses in order to create paths that would transition the response effectively to subsequent questions.

3.4.1.1 Interview Question Model

The interview questions were specifically formulated according to three categories based on the objective of conducting interviews with three different groups of informants, as shown in figure 7. First, the interview questions for the executives focused on determining how to domesticate and integrate social media into the enterprise in order to support organizational innovation processes in the context of business strategies and goals. Second, the interview questions for the designers focused on how to design social media tools that would be sustainable and interoperable across an organization. Third, the

53 interview questions for the designers focused on capturing job-related experiences of using social media tools. A complete set of interview questions is included in Appendix A, B, and C.

As depicted in figure 7, there are four blank intersections: executive-users (EU), designer-executives (DE), executive-designers (ED), and executive-designer-users (DEU). At the outset, these intersections were unknown. As the data collection and data analysis progressed, these intersections emerged as themes and influenced the open- coding scheme.

Executives

The holistic approach to domesticating and integrating social media into the enterprise to support organizational innovation processes in the context of business strategies and goals

EU ED

DEU The functionality, Social media-mediated interoperability, and job-related collaboration sustainability of experiences DU social media tools

Users Designers

Figure 7 Research Interview Model

54 3.4.1.2 Interview Procedures

The interviews were conducted by phone and secure-protocol web teleconferencing internal to the case study companies. Each interview session took approximately 60 minutes and was captured in an audio recording, which was later transcribed. Over the following six months, email, the phone, and web teleconferencing were used to follow up on particular interview questions that needed further clarification. The data and the documents related to this study were stored and secured in room 307G of the Information Sciences and Technology Building on Pennsylvania State University’s University Park Campus in a password-protected file in a locked, secure cabinet.

3.4.2 Case Study

This research adopted case study as a qualitative research methodology in social science for in-depth investigation of individual, group, or event to explore causation in order to uncover the underlying principles. Case studies become very relevant when applying them to investigate contemporary phenomenon in a real-life context where the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not well-defined (Yin, 2009) and when the researcher has little control over the events (Becker, et al., 2005). In this regard, case study approach sought a holistic understanding of the event or situation in question using inductive logic—reasoning from specific to more general terms (Becker, et al., 2005). At the end, a case study yields the researcher a sharpened understanding of the instance, and may also guide future research agendas.

This research used multiple case studies as an average single case study does not provide sufficient information (Yin, 2009). According to Flyvbjerg (2006), the case studies selected are information-oriented and paradigmatic because this study sought to understand how enterprises can domesticate and accommodate social media in order to harness socio-technical complexity in the FFE phase and support its innovation process. Based on this objective, outcomes were formulated as a set of templates designed to be

55 useful to a range of enterprises interested in developing their own tools to support FFE activities in their own innovation process.

The researcher applied criteria to selecting the case study companies from which the participants were recruited. 17 The researcher looked for companies considered innovative by the trusted business and industry journal, Businessweek. .18 Next, the researcher investigated whether the prospective case study companies were currently using social media tools internally to innovate and collaborate by following the news stories and press releases available on their websites. Based on these criteria and the willingness of companies to commit to a series of interviews and document reviews and whether it would allow the researcher access to its intranet, two companies were selected as in-depth cases. A third company, which initially appeared to fit the criteria, was used for comparison purposes. However, it could not be formally included as its social media efforts had not gone beyond the pilot stage in terms of innovations at the time the research was conducted.

3.4.3 Data Collection

3.4.3.1 Study Phases

The study consisted of four major study phases which each encompasses data collection and data analysis. In addition, each phase may employ different research methods, research instruments, and data analytical tools. First, social media site designs in participant enterprises were examined. Second, the content of discourse pertaining to FFE activities generated by participant enterprises was analyzed. The data collected from the designs and the discourse were carefully analyzed with interpretive and descriptive lens

17 Finally, the researcher sought and acquired initial contacts of the prospective case study companies through his academic advisor, Dr. Petrick who held a growing list of contacts of many companies in various industries. Dr. Petrick, helped initiate contacts with potential case studies companies in the fall semester of 2010. In summer 2011, the researcher established three contact points with three hi-tech companies. The researcher worked with the contact points for recruiting the participants. In addition, communication among the researcher and the participants were under the supervision of the contact points.

18 The list of the companies were drawn from Businessweek.com (http://investing.businessweek.com/research/overview/overview.asp)

56 through different, but relevant, theories as illustrated in Chapter 2. The outcomes from these two phases were processed to formulate the interview questions for the third and fourth phases.

Third, the researcher conducted qualitative interviews with social software users in the participant enterprises to capture their behavior derived by the use of the social software. Forth, the researcher interviewed social software designers 19 to gain the design insights. Like phase two and three, the discourses given from the interviews with both the users and designers were carefully analyzed with interpretive lens through different, but relevant, theory.

3.4.3.2 Document Review

Before the interview question model was formulated, it was necessary to conduct research into the history of innovation in the case study companies. The research covered a broad spectrum of materials including press releases, annual reports, training materials, strategic presentations, and many other online and printed materials. The document review provided the researcher with insight into the case study companies’ innovation paths and their use of social media tools. Often, when clarification was needed on certain issues, the researcher reviewed the documents, and as such the reviews complemented the interviews as part of the data collection process.

3.4.3.3 Interview

After obtaining lists of potential participants from each of the case study companies, the researcher asked to schedule interviews to take place on web conference software or over the phone. For web interviews, the researcher and the participants were able to visually and audibly share a desktop screen and presentation. For the phone interviews, the researcher and the participants communicated orally and aurally only.

19 Social software designers could have different job titles which depend on their enterprise’s organizational structure such as software analysis, system analysis, or software engineer.

57 All the discussion sessions were recorded on audiotape and later transcribed into MS Word files for coding and analysis. Each session took approximately one hour (sixty minutes). In the session, the participant was asked to respond to the interview questions formulated according to each participant group’s roles and responsibilities: users, designers, and managers.

As planned, twenty people participated in the interviews. The case study companies provided fifteen employee contacts, who were categorized into three groups: five users, five designers, and five managers. However, the actual total number of the participations who took part in this research was twenty. In addition, some participants fit more than one category. For example, some managers and users were involved in designing and implementing social media tools; therefore, they were eligible for the interview designed for managers and for the one targeting designers. The configuration of participants is illustrated in table 4.

Case Study Company # Users # Designers # Managers # Total Global Engineering Solution (GES) 1 4 2 7 Universal Business Sourcing (UBS) 3 3 1 7 GlobalPharma Corporation (GPC) 2 2 2 6 20

Table 4 Case Study Companies and Participants

3.4.4 Data Analysis

3.4.4.1 Initial Research Framework

An initial research framework was constructed and drawn from five different theoretical orientations: 20 complex adaptive system theories, social technical theories, social capital

20 Complex adaptive system was employed because front-end activities are fuzzy and complex, emergent, and dynamic. Web 2.0 technologies itself is self-organizing, and the information security polices and risks are not well understood.

58 theories, theories of organizational creativity and innovation, knowledge management theories, and all the relevant literature discussed in Chapter 2. This initial research framework provided guidance for the data collection and data analysis. When leveled, the very elements constructing the framework are people, culture, technology artifact, and process. All of which are affected as each element communicates with the others potentially leading to collaboration and thus innovation. To interpretively understand the phenomenon, the complex adaptive system was adopted as it is capable of holistically capturing the complex, dynamic, and adaptive use of social media necessary to support innovation process at the front end of the process.

As illustrated in figure 8, the initial research framework model has four layers. The layers are connected to one another in pyramidal fashion, and all lead to the top piece, i.e., the innovation piece. The framework posits that the use of social media for innovation is affected by the people, the (organizational) culture, processes, and technology. The first and fundamental layer is social capital. In the social capital perspective, trust is the vital socio-psychological factor driving whether any tool is successful, i.e., whether people participate in it and use it fully. If trust is present there is a greater chance that people will electronically collaborate in terms of sharing information, knowledge, and ideas. That is, trust draws individuals together and encourages them to participate in knowledge exchange and transfer.

When a certain level of trust is present, it is possible for an organic community to form. In this layer, users are free to form groups based on their interests, both work and non- work related. As a result, organic groups generate organic knowledge within the groups on the network in a relatively structured way. In the next phase, the vernacular collaboration layer, the organic knowledge generated by organic groups can be retained,

Social capital lent an investigative lens to researcher to apprehend knowledge transactions and information processing through electronic social networking applications running on Web 2.0 platform. Knowledge management theories guided the study on the capture of information activities facilitated by Web 2.0 platform which are psychologically and intuitively encouraging individual creativity and innovation. This later transformed into organizational creativity and innovation. Once a potential creative or innovative idea emerges, effective tools are needed to capture, store, and make the idea accessible, available, and searchable. To understand the implication of the interaction between human and technological artifacts theoretically distributedly embedded in adoption of Web 2.0 for enterprise use, the research employed socio-technique which is quintessential for IS designer to optimize social and technical aspects.

59 transferred, exchanged, and used within and among groups in an informal way. Ultimately, vernacular collaboration can lead to innovation. In addition, all the layers are under corporate control, which is reflected in corporate policies, rules, and regulations.

Figure 8 Initial Research Framework

This framework is constructed according to the objective of this research. Building on the very basic elements of a complex adaptive system, the framework is designed to capture the phenomenon in an exploratory way. As the research progresses, for the sake of the comprehensiveness, the framework is subject to modification according to emerging insights gained through data collection and data analysis procedures.

60 3.4.4.2 Data Analysis Procedure

The data was collected from archival documents and qualitative interviews. As for the qualitative interviews, data were collected from the case study companies. The participants from each case study company were categorized into three groups based on their roles and the relevance of those roles to using social media for internal innovation. The data obtained from the archival documents (i.e., the company’s website, press releases, requirement documentation, and system architecture) were used to complement the analysis.

Guided by theories and using an interpretive lens, the researcher employed a three-level open-coding scheme to analyze the data collected from the archival documents and the qualitative interviews. Figure 9 summarizes and depicts the main activities in the data analysis procedures. For each coding level, the researcher employed theoretical, but open, coding schemes under the initial research framework. In the data analysis process, the researcher occasionally went back to the research questions to incorporate emerging themes, to review additional relevant literature, thereby refining and improving the initial research framework.

Qualitative data analysis (QDA) comprises three fundamental interconnected and complementary activities—collecting, noticing, and analyzing—that are non-linear, and usually recursive (Seidel, 1998). As the data analysis process progressed, the researcher engaged in these activities interchangeably to gain insights emerging from the data that were then used as a basis for improving the research framework. This research employed certain qualitative analysis techniques that were theoretical in nature together with open coding, content analysis, and data triangulation.

61

Figure 9 Data Analysis Procedure

This research employed both theoretical coding and open coding techniques to systematize the data collected. Open coding is an inductive analysis whereby a researcher discovers, categorizes, makes sense of, and refines emerging themes drawn from the phenomenon found in a text (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). In this regard, the open coding process is considered fundamentally interpretive in nature, as it incorporates the researcher’s interpretations of and reflections on the data (Strauss & Corbin, 1994). On the other hand, theoretical coding provides a researcher with pre-defined systemic codes and themes and relevant literature that advocates conceptualizing and categorizing the data (Glaser, 1978, 1992, 2001). In this study, the researcher initiated a data analysis

62 process with a theoretical coding technique that was guided by the research objective, the research question, and the initial research framework drawn from the relevant literature. In addition, a content analysis technique 21 was used in the coding process, as the researcher reflected on the data. Through this process, new themes emerged on which basis the researcher refined the research framework.

Triangulation, coined by Sevigny (1977), is a process of verification that increases validity and integrity of inferences and interpretation the investigators draws (Mason, 2002; O'Donoghue & Punch, 2003; Schwandt, 2007; Yin, 2009) as it is helpful “for cross-checking, or for ferreting out varying perspectives on complex issues and events” (Wolcott, 1994, p. 192). In essence, triangulation refers to multiple sources of evidence such as data, investigators, theories, methodologies, or all combined (Denzin, 2009; Schwandt, 2007; Yin, 2009). In this study, triangulation was employed to cross-examine the data collected from multiple sources (interviews and archival documents) to ensure the quality of the research.

3.4.5 Research Evaluation Criteria

The objective of a research evaluation is to assess the quality of a research study. Originating in a positivist research paradigm, evaluation criteria are used to ensure that a research study is objective, reliable, and valid (Mason, 2002; Patton, 2002). However, qualitative research evaluation is concerned with two major criteria, namely validity and reliability. Validity itself has three dimensions: construct validity, internal validity, and external validity (Yin, 2009).

Construct validity generally refers to the degree of agreement between the underlying theoretical concept and a specific measuring device or procedure. Also, construct validity

21 Content analysis is a systematic research method for analyzing textual information by compressing text into fewer content categories based on explicit rules of coding in a standardized way that allows evaluators to make inferences about the information (GOA, 1996; Krippendorff, 2004; Neuendorf, 2002; Orwin, 1994; Weber, 1990). Holsti (1969) gave a broad definition of content analysis as “any technique for making inferences by objectively and systematically identifying specified characteristics of messages” (p.14). Content analysis not only helps summarize written material, but also describes the attitudes or perceptions of the author of that material.

63 was also achieved by member checking conducted by the researcher and through the informants co-review of the material constructed from their data. The review served to compare and contrast the interpretations of the researcher with those of the participants.

Internal validity is an inductive estimate of the degree to which conclusions about causal relationships can be made, based on the measures used, the research setting, and the whole research design. Internal validity was determined by means of triangulation throughout the study. External validity addresses the extent to which the results of a study can be generalized from a specific sample to a larger context. To archive external validity, the control variables, criteria, and methods were administered to ensure consistency across the cases. Internal validity and external validity, therefore, each played an important role in affirming that the findings would be accurate and generalizable.

3.5 Summary of Research Design

This chapter provides a discussion of the research design in reference to the research background and motivation, the rationale underlying the research objectives and questions, the research epistemology, and the research methods and instruments. Building on an interpretive epistemological standpoint, this research employed a qualitative case study with qualitative interviews and qualitative analysis techniques to investigate the phenomenon in an exploratory way. Three multinational companies were studied. The data were collected from two sources; qualitative interviews and document reviews. The data were then analyzed using theoretical and open-coding techniques for systematizing and categorizing the data through a content analysis technique. The triangulation technique was introduced in order to verify the consistency of the data from different sources. In addition, evaluation criteria for qualitative research (validity and reliability) were adopted to ensure that the study would be of high quality.

64 Chapter 4: Case Study Results

This chapter begins with an introduction to both Global Engineering Solution (GES) and the Universal Business Sourcing (UBS) 22 , both of which are global companies with multiple divisions and locations worldwide. A third company, GlobalPharma Corporation, was also included in the overall research, but not included in the data analysis as it did not meet the selection criterion whereby the companies included were all to be engaged in a formally established ongoing social media effort. Both GES and UBS have aggressively adopted social media tools, but they have done so in different ways. GES is using a home-grown system, whereas UBS has partnered with Media Vibe Solution, adopting that company’s social media software tools. The chapter then focuses attention on specific aspects related to social media. Throughout the results sections, quotes from participants are interwoven with descriptive text.

4.1 Global Engineering Solution (GES)

GES, a multinational conglomerate company has 190 locations globally distributed with over 400,000 employees. In 2011, GES posted revenues of more than 80 billion. GES products include communication systems, power generation and automation technologies, medical technology, transportation technology, and home and infrastructure software, among others. GES also provides services around its many product categories.

Innovation has long been a cornerstone of GES, dating back to the early 20 th century with innovations such as handheld ultrasound machine in a size of a PDA, microphones-based fetal heart monitor devices 23 , and a steam turbine for use in Brazilian sugar mills. Recent BusinessWeek rankings place top 50, GES is in among the global companies in terms of

22 GES and UBS are factious names for these actual companies. In their descriptions, some details about company operations have been modified to ensure confidentiality. 23 A Fetal Heart Monitor device can monitor the heart rate of fetuses in the womb. Usually an ultrasound technology is used, and the device costs up to several thousand USD. However, the economic Fetal Heart Monitor uses special microphones instead which cost dramatically less than ultrasound-based one.

65 innovation in 2011. For purposes of this research, the majority of the participants were located in the GES Europe, and interviews were also conducted with designers in Europe.

Social media at GES moved from customized intranet collaborative applications onto a social media platform for innovation in 2000 when the division created their very first generation Enterprise 2.0 infrastructure. In this infrastructure GES combined several social media tools for internal collaboration aimed at innovation. For example, the division used a Wiki engine as a knowledge repository and Yammer for private communications within the division. 24

GES has continued to develop and expand its in-house social medial application, InnoMedia. InnoMedia which is essentially built around networks and is focused on knowledge areas, with the primary intent of helping GES employees rapidly locate solutions and experts on a case-by-case basis. The early participants were engineers and knowledge workers, and then InnoMedia was extended to entire organization; however, the active users were basically the engineers. So far, GES anticipated potential cost savings of up to one million Euros as employees sought the best collaborators within their internal distributed networks. As for 2011, InnoMedia was able to reach out to over 400,000 users across the globe, GES employees and GES’ business partners. In addition, new social media applications were being developed, and next generation of InnoMedia was being conceptualized.

4.2 Universal Business Sourcing (UBS)

Ranked among the 50 Most Admired Companies on the Fortune Global Companies list, UBS provides information technology and other consulting services to 15 industry sectors as well as national and local governments. UBS has over 97,000 employees in over 90 countries worldwide, providing services including systems integration and professional services, enterprise application development and management, application

24 GES also uses Twitter for its public relations activities, but since that is focused on external communication; it is not considered part of the current research effort.

66 software for financial services, business process outsourcing, managed hosting services and application and IT infrastructure outsourcing. In 2011, UBS posted revenues of over $16 billion.

Recently, UBS made an aggressive move in its social media platform, partnering with Media Vibe Solution and adopting their Social Business Software (SBS). SBS combined the power of community software, collaboration software, social networking software and social media monitoring offerings into an integrated suite. The software enabled UBS to use social media to connect to employees and customers. This research is focused on the BizGateway system (Connect, Communication, and Collaborate), the portion of the SBS aimed at internal communication and collaboration among UBS employees. UBS was recognized for achievements in social business strategy as BizGateway was honored with a Community Adoption Award at international conference for the successful adoption of its internal business social networking initiative in 2010.

In the first six months of the BizGateway initiative, more than 25,000 UBS employees rapidly adopted and joined BizGateway, and a quarter of them got involved in the first twenty weeks. UBS found that BizGateway already delivered business values. For example, UBS’s employees were able to find the right solutions from global expert colleagues in less than an hour. This resulted in reducing their proposal development cycle. In addition, the system helped new jointers to get onboard and feel connected right away to team and to the UBS. BizGateway helped accelerate the speed of communication and collaboration, and thus drive the business process efficiencies as a whole. As of 2011, the number of the total registered users was approximately 87,000 employees and continued to increase.

The following section presents the reality of social media platforms in corporate contexts at the surface level . Although sharing the same terminology, social media for enterprises and social media for personal use are different in a number of ways. Therefore, certain assumptions and expectations made in regard to personal use of social media may not be relevant to the enterprise context. The evidence shows that adoption, operational context

67 and control, entertainment value, participation architecture, and control are important aspects in determining how social media are really used, for what reasons, and to what effect really function. As stated, the findings in regard to the surface level of the phenomenon are discussed herein.

4.3 Adoption Enhancer

Adopting enterprise social media posed challenges to the deployment teams. Many users considered using enterprise social media to be an additional demand on their time. Therefore, it was important to craft a user-friendly introduction and invitation to persuade the target users to join. In this regard, an effective way to persuade potential users to engage with the platform was to issue a message offering the media as a new, better way to work .

One of the things that I would like to show to people was this is not an extra work; this is new work that you have to do. This is helping you indentify work that you have been doing already that might have been done in a more collaborative, more interactive, more iterative, but essentially more effective manner. [Christopher, UBS]

Persuading potential users to join the enterprise social media was part of half the story. The remainder was to encourage users to stay active by engaging with the communities in the network—a goal that required further and ongoing positive re-enforcement . From the findings, a common tactical approach to tackling this was to charge a small community with the job of pushing other users to be more involved in the platform.

There are several groups, several use cases right now. And the most important thing is that you have one guy or small team who is actively pushing the new way of working, moderating, and running around and tell people that this is great to come join us, not to have to participate, but there is the benefit if you participate. We definitely have better communication and collaboration. [James, GES]

68 In the early days, we made a very big, significant effort before we opened the door; we actually prepared what we call “window addressing.” One of the roles of the advocates was to attract the sponsors, the creation of some of the group, some of the content that we want to be within the environment before we are going to do that with the whole organization. I followed the communication manager, she is very good welcoming new people. If you are new to UBS and post like “my first blog page,” and she will say “welcome to BizGateway, congratulations for starting blogs.” All she did was say hi. And I got people saying welcome and great stuff and share something with them and we can point them to groups; that’s important. [Christopher, UBS]

In addition, incentive programs (Bughin, 2008), direct encouragement messages and participation from top executives and managers helped accelerate the rate at which employees began to participate. The following are examples of successful approaches to encouraging users to participate:

They [the top executives] sent a blanket e-mail to all the employees, “BizGateway is now open for business, go find out.” The take-up has been very interesting that the people who jumped on first were the most enthusiastic people, followed by the followers, followed by the less enthusiastic people. […] The group presidents jump on board and start blogging enthusiastically then people comment on the blogs and so forth and so on. They are certainly getting a lot of value out of it. And that’s the network effect that everybody knows about this sort of thing makes that value rapidly increases. [George, UBS]

We are awarding people who are running communities very successfully as well as people who are active contributors. I believe there have been two contests, and people could win iPads if they are very positive active contributors or very positive active mangers of the community. [William, GES]

4.4 Operational Context & Control

The world has already recognized the power and value of social media platforms that allow individuals to share information over electronic social networks. Nonetheless, whether the enterprise world will succeed in delivering the same power and value on

69 social media platforms is yet to be determined (Bughin, 2008; Bughin, et al., 2008; Holtzblatt, 2010; Levy, 2009).

The enterprise world is much more constrained than the cyber world is; therefore, the respective audiences, rules, and expectations of the two worlds are what constitute the difference. The findings showed that the participants were conscious of the distinction between the enterprise platform and the Internet platform that supports personal social media activities, as they aligned their participation and involvement in the best interests of the company. That is, their use was work-related, the network was professional, and the code of conduct mattered.

InnoMedia is an enterprise application. What differences? Well, what you do on Facebook is mostly related to your time or your free time. Working on InnoMedia is related to your job. It’s not like posting on social media on the internet. Normally you post something to your colleagues because you think that the information is useful to other, useful because of their job description. It’s not about personal; it’s work-related. [David, GES]

It’s more about enterprise vs. personal level. The big difference was within a company, there was a feeling like the return on an investment in dollar value, the return on an investment investing in our employees. […] It wasn’t like Facebook where people talked about how drunk they got last night. But we didn’t see that on the system because its primary use is to conduct business. [Gary, UBS]

The philosophy underpinning the design of the social media platform was about freedom of expression and the exchange of information, and knowledge. When adopted and deployed in an enterprise operational context, however, the platform was unquestionably under corporate control.

We are not talking Twitter or Facebook. We are talking about social business collaboration. And I think of social business as another layer that allows the individual to be in control. [Patricia, UBS]

70 [The platforms] will always be somewhat restricted by our business conduct guidelines and to protect IP, etc. - they are primarily a form of interaction with external communities (customers / vendors / partners) and a feedback channel - as such it is predominantly a marketing/external communication platform. Some topics are governed closely on the global level (sites that conflict with GES values / conduct guidelines like "hate speech", etc). The remaining topics (like access to public Social Media platforms for business purposes) are governed by the regional (cluster/country) acceptable use policy that will have to take into account local laws and regulations as well as cultural perspective on the use of such sites / platforms. [Jennifer ,GES]

4.5 Participation Architecture

Of three approaches to social media on the Internet, content-centric (YouTube, Wikipedia), person-centric (Facebook, LinkedIn), and network-centric (InnoMedia, BizGateway), the enterprise world emphasis is network-centric.

In essence, the companies already had a large amount of knowledge content contributed by many individual employees. Often, the knowledge was created and stored locally. In such cases, the way to access the knowledge and the authoring individual was through the network.

At GES, InnoMedia, was explicitly designed to enable employees to locate the experts in the network. That is, when employees needed information, they would connect with the tools capable of directing them to experts who could offer assistance. In other words, the GES approach was a network-centric approach: it focused on professional usage to support organization-wide business cases.

What it does is create the community [on the network], and that’s the big part about it because to a larger degree people who would have never met within the company say it was kind of the tool because they can look into the areas that they are interested in that they have expertise in. The other thing especially within the context of an urgent request is that you can have a targeted call for help. In the past, you might have called a couple of experts that you knew and if they could help, that’s good. It’s too direct

71 to do the research. Now you have a wider community that you can send the urgent request. It is not so much the tool that makes you more innovative. It is more of creating a network that you can find people who have knowledge, much more easily than you could before. [William, GES]

Likewise, UBS’s BizGateway was designed to facilitate the users’ efforts to reach out to experts on the network in the same fashion as GES’s InnoMedia was designed to do.

The issue that I’ve always seen with the content-centric approach is separating the good stuff from the people. People on the network seem to be more reliable to achieve that goal. […] The largest focus was to move away from a content-centric approach of collaborating. […] It was very much meant to better connect people inside our organization that we were not really able to find. [It was about] not only asking experts, but also in a way that we could start to connect with persons that we knew were delivering the contents that were valuable to us on personal basic. That’s the primary aspect, the ability to bring people to the equation b/c the preceding tools were focused on content. [Matthew, UBS]

4.6 Entertainment Value

A variety of social media sites have been highly recognized for their entertainment value and cognitive playfulness, as individuals personally enjoyed interactions with their peers on these sites. Studies have found positive links between entertainment value and the formation of social capital in online communication (Anderson, 2008; Burke, et al., 2010; Ellison, et al., 2007; Gaudeul & Peroni, 2010; Gentzkow & Shapiro, 2010; Hampton, 2002; Hampton & Wellman, 2003; Kavanaugh, et al., 2005; Steinfield, et al., 2008; Zhang, et al., 2010). In this regard, the features delivering entertainment value and cognitive playfulness are important for the ability of enterprise social media platforms to foster collaboration and thus innovation.

Although the transactions and interactions on enterprise social media were supposedly work-related, the social media designers recognized the importance of non-work-related

72 space where employees could talk about their personal interests as long as the conversations were in compliance with corporate electronic communication policies.

Then what happened is making people feel comfortable. People having different interests found their own space shared with people who have the same interest at work, so then they have more affinity or a more positive relationship especially from different countries. That stuff is important because it increases the value of the relationship before you get started on working on work-related activities, you trust that person more. It doesn’t mean that it happens to everybody in the community. But it inspires you because it makes the results of business interaction; people support each other more rather than less. [Daniel, UBS]

In this way, allowing employees to freely communicate in work space designated for non-work-related conversation promoted the relationship among the company, the users, and the platform, serving to increase trust among the users. Once the users had established a relationship and trust on a personal level in this space, the possibility was open that the users would also commit to the work environment on the platform. Thus, having this type of space greatly benefited the users on both a personal and a professional level, as it promoted communication and collaboration.

So there was kind of social type of thing what we called “water cooler,” the space that people were talking about your pets. As well as technology- related stuff, so there were conversations and the groups that people can immediately get thrown into which then engaged the opportunity for relationship building. What you got the content and the people you met help you get the connection and start to follow people that you find interesting or useful to you in your work, perhaps similar interests around the company. I think we have some senior executive people with their blog messages; that also helped. [Christopher, UBS]

We needed to do that, and this is to your point about trust. We needed to do that because those were playful interactions as opposed to very boring, purposefully, dried interactions without trust, particularly among people who didn’t know each other well at all. We have built that trust which we thought was key to getting them to go out and to actually do something useful and to make the money for the company from it. We felt that it’s necessary to be able to exploit the water cooler effect.

73 [George, UBS]

4.7 Alternative Knowledge Management

The fact that social media platforms are used extensively for knowledge sharing and collaboration over the Internet has given rise to the idea that social media will replace traditional knowledge management approaches. This conceptualization, however, is not applicable to or valid in a corporate context. The findings showed that the social media approach was not expected to replace a conventional knowledge management approach. Instead, social media was considered to be an alternative knowledge management approach, not a substitute. Moreover, conventional knowledge management was still necessary because it constituted the intellectual jewel vault of the company.

4.7.1 Democratic Approach

Social media offers a more flexible way to deal with interactive knowledge and information processing, and in this regard it has no predecessor in the world of knowledge management. From this angle, the social media platform provided individuals with an equal opportunity to access, author, and edit content without any pre-screening procedure or censoring. This mechanism accelerated agreement on knowledge subject matter and validated such.

I believe in as much in the past, knowledge management was not democratic, not two-way. Two-way process is user-generated content which user essentially is not explicitly and implicitly voting on the value of knowledge and information. […] Conventional wisdom on a particular topic could be shifted very rapidly if you have a vocal strong proponent for the change point of view. [Brian, UBS]

When you are trying to relate the problems, I saw people going to databases which are usually outdated. [Traditional knowledge management] is poor. […] The social media, the network, the collective mind, is very the alternative of knowledge management tool, usually when

74 you are trying to find expertise. So thinking about what is the purpose of it. I think it is the collective mind. I have a problem; we have to try to bring people to solve it. [Thomas, GES]

4.7.2 Transient Approach

The traditional knowledge management approach is intended to process mature, long- term knowledge and documentation through rigorous procedures in connection with corporate intellectual property policies. In contrast, social media by design is technologically an agile platform for processing unsettled knowledge pieces without interrupting formal corporate knowledge management. According to this finding, the social media platform benefited from collaboration on short-term knowledge processing, namely the brainstorming process.

Definitely, KM is like when you are looking for something, you will get something in return. It’s like going to the library for a book; you find it and check out the book. It’s more like putting a team together and creating a book. [Gary, UBS]

This platform is appropriate, and of course with the tool itself there is also search functionality. However, it is fully understood; it seems to us that the data on the platform is not so much a long-term knowledge as it seems to be; it’s more transient. [William, GES]

4.7.3 Corporate Jewel Vault

From a corporate intellectual property (IP) point of view, knowledge management is indispensible. Findings indicated that conventional knowledge management was still necessary to secure and protect corporate jewels such as IP items, business-sensitive documentation, and trade secrets. Therefore, access to these items was restricted in order to protect the company and its operations.

75 So, is it going to replace the KM? The answers is NO. Some of the pieces of KM might be an enterprise content management system where you are storing approved procedures, documents, processes, security practices, or whatever kind of corporate jewels. That’s social media is becoming the interface to some of the back-end stuff. So the back-end content management system, which is storing that stuff in there, is for a lot of good reasons such as retention, record management, discovery action. Social media doesn’t really support well at this point in time. Social media becomes the place that exposes the content in a much more easy to consume way than which you can get when just talking to the old-minded legacy system directly. [Matthew, UBS]

Additionally, the knowledge management approach was considered a great comfort factor for executives and managers in dealing with IP matters. In this regard, the formal and structured nature of traditional knowledge management made it possible for executives and managers to monitor and handle the flow of information, knowledge, and IP in the company.

Knowledge management implies how [knowledge is] to be structured. The management will love the lifecycle of knowledge and whatever document, the intangible knowledge, the context, and I think it does is very good job in capturing. [Christopher, UBS]

4.8 Chapter Summary

This chapter provided background knowledge about the companies selected for the case studies and a discussion of the reality of social media for enterprise use in a big picture though unframed way. Historically, these multinational companies have performed successfully in a global context in terms of the market, recognition, and innovation. However, the obvious differences among these companies were the level of expertise in social media. There were also differences in how the companies implemented and deployed their social media platforms. GES created its own in-house social media platform from scratch. UBS partnered with a collaboration and social software solutions company. In addition, these differences in social media expertise resulted in divergent paths in regard to vision, use, and performance.

76

Compared to mainstream social media, enterprise social media was more structured and work-related, as the latter was designed and used to achieve business objectives and organizational goals. However, it was important to have a space that enabled employees to communicate freely, the provision of which positively impacted adoption rates and enabled employees to develop relationships with their peers. In addition, enterprise social media emphasized a network-centric participatory architecture, as the network was used to locate knowledge and experts in the organization. Corporate control was, however, unavoidable for social media in enterprise contexts because the rules, norms, and environment are different from that of social media used to fulfill personal goals on the Internet. Finally, the social media platform constituted an alterative approach to knowledge management, rather than as a substitute for it.

77 Chapter 5: Enterprise Social Media through the CAS Lens

The goal of this chapter is to develop a theoretical framework based on the findings guided by complex adaptive systems theory and other theoretical elements discussed in Chapter 2. As the theory development progresses, the relevant components are discovered, addressed, and affirmed by the findings. In the closing sections of this chapter, the theoretical framework is updated and finalized. The resulting framework is subsequently addressed in Chapter 6.

5.1 Social Capital Formation

According to the findings, individuals on enterprise social media were looking for and, at the same time, establishing trust in the system as a collaborative paradigm . Given a certain level of trust, the users were willing to step forward to participate, contribute, and commit to collaboration on the social media tools. In other words, trust is framed in this study as the belief/realization that the platform allows users to work in a better value- added way than had been possible before its advent. Drawn from the findings, trust in an enterprise social media system incorporated three elementary factors: trust in those participating, trust in the network, and trust in the content generated by the people in the network.

5.1.1 Trust in the Network

In the context of this study, trust in the network referred to users’ confidence that the platform brought valus to the users and/or, in other words, that the network was capable of delivering the information that the users were looking for. From this angle, the participants established trust in the network through certain means. Based on the findings, the factors that contributed to participants’ trust in the network are accessibility, the dynamics of participating, and coaching and reception.

78 5.1.1.1 Accessibility

Accessibility referred to the users’ ability to reach the platform through multiple devices. This could be achieved by providing users with multiple ways to access the enterprise social media application. For instance, GES’s InnoMedia was accessible on different hardware platforms such as personal computers, iPhones, iPads, BlackBerrys, and other smart handheld devices.

There were iPads; there were people who are very active on this kind of platform. So, there was kind of encouragement to internal communication. We communicated the objective, the availability of the platform. We made sure that there were no barriers in accessing it. So, that’s available to every employee without any logon mechanism; you can logon as GES employee and go there directly, so somebody recognizes you and propose people in your organization that you might be interested to work with. [William, GES]

In the example provided, InnoMedia users could access the enterprise platforms via iPads. As a consequence, the users developed trust in the platform and the network, as they perceived that the system was available to them in a variety of ways.

5.1.1.2 Dynamics of Participation

Dynamics of participation in this context referred to the liveliness, responsiveness, and interactiveness of the users on the platform. Dynamics were assessed based on the amount of traffic and the activity level generated by the users on the platform. For example, on the Internet, people came to trust the Facebook network more than the MySpace network, as they perceived the high dynamics on Facebook (e.g., the high number of participants). Compared to Facebook, MySpace was perceived as less dynamic, and people, therefore, lost their trust in the site. In the enterprise context, findings suggested that, the dynamics somehow psychologically drew employees to join and encouraged existing users to more actively participate in the platform, such that both these processes led to increased trust in the network. A GES user (see the next quotation) offered an example wherein trust in the network was achieved based on users’ responses

79 to posts on the platform. The user framed such responsiveness in terms of community spirit:

One of the most important things in the process is to learn how to give it back. So people use it to post questions there, but I’m not quite sure that they use it to give answers. This is quite the mentality of community. It’s always good to put questions there. But when you put a lot of questions there and no one answers it, you lose your confidence in the process. I think everybody that somehow replies to one question, at least, to emphasize the whole process of the whole community spirit. It’s a process; people have to learn to give in order to get. [Thomas, GES]

5.1.1.3 Reception and Coaching

Setting up a small reception community proactively pushing users to be more involved in the platform was not only useful in platform adoption but also psychologically comforting to the users in that it enabled them to become more confident in staying on and participating in the platform. Likewise, having a coaching community to support new users and to locate experts for help with an unanswered post contributed to the increasing level of confidence in the platform, and hence increased trust in the network.

On-going, we have a support operation team, we watch the feedback areas, we communicate when we know there is a bug, if someone has a problem or not understanding the concept, we suggest they work with one of the lifeguards, we point them to the lifeguard group if they need a high touch, right conversation, it would be a little bit more of discussion. [Patricia, UBS]

As for the network itself, there are lots people who were on the sidelines, who watched for a while and were almost intimidated by asking and answering questions. What we did was we measured that when people came to BizGateway for the first time, we did a soft watch for a number of months, walking in and showing them how to participate. So people can “trust” the network. […] We have moderators “lifeguards” telling the expert to get them the answer. So the people who posted the questions gradually began to trust the network of the people that they were working with. [Gary, UBS]

80 In addition, lifeguards or community managers not only helped new participants, but also rescued abandoned unfinished/unanswered conversations by directing subject matter experts to the conversations over a long period of time. As participants became more confident and more comfortable, they were increasingly engaged and interacted with the platform. As a result, they witnessed the value of the network and the community, they wanted the service and the community to continue, and therefore they became active contributors.

I want the service to continue. I want the community to expand, and it would not be possible if there is one-way communication. So the community doesn’t remain. It’s really selfish reasons, persuasion. I want to keep the service and the community. And the only way to do it is to contribute. [Thomas, GES]

5.1.2 Trust in People

Trust in people was tied to users’ perception of the credibility of any given person posted information on the network. Basically, the goal of using enterprise the social media platform was to locate experts and find solutions. Users expected to see that authors of content had some kind of credentials before deciding to accept the content.

5.1.2.1 Rich Profile

The findings indicated that users came to trust a content author based on examining that person’s credentials through a variety of means, such as professional experience and skills and history of activities on the platform. Therefore, having a user profile with the information mentioned would help a user connect with other users who were reaching out to each other to collaborate on topics of mutual interest.

I have business questions and I’m looking for someone who has a particular set of skill or expertise, I will go to BizGateway first, put in the keyword and search for colleagues, using the information on their profile. [Brian, UBS]

81

In addition, incorporating a user photo into the user profile could help mitigate anxiety resulting from communicating in a non face-to-face environment.

I think trust is always created by personal context. When you don’t have it, one thing that helps is a photo that you can see a face of the person that you are talking to. This is one very cheap and effective thing. [Joseph, GES]

I think [having a profile photo] makes a difference. Before I talked with you, I didn’t know that you are a man. I’m not familiar with names from Asia. Your name is long, and lots of letters in it. You never know. And this is important. It’s informative of the gender, male or female, as an icon. But a picture tells so much about whether you are young or old, male or female. This is something that your face is important. [Thomas, GES]

In addition to work-related professional information, putting a certain amount of non- work-related personal information on the platform proved beneficial in that doing so reminded users that they were all part of the same organization. This raised awareness of organizational citizenship, which in turn supported an atmosphere of trust and created a level of satisfaction with the communication.

I think before we are going to reply to somebody, we have to feel connected first, some kind of identification. Of course, everybody is related because they are all GES employees. This is already a bond, but not on a personal level. [...] People put more out there about private stuff. People should be able to put private stuff … to say this is me and my family; I’m part of a bigger family at GES. So, it should be able to make personal interaction that people can trust you more. [Thomas, GES]

82 5.1.2.2 Trust Off-Platform

The rich profile feature proved beneficial, to a certain extent, to users’ perceptions of the credibility of an authoring user on the platform. However, relying solely on this technical formula might render an incomplete account of how people come to trust an enterprise social media platform:

If you are talking about how trust got built. […] I think that there was some trust before the system was put in place. There was the same trust in terms of people’s perspective, but now the circle of trust becomes larger. [Gary, UBS]

The users still needed to develop a social relationship off the platform and to bring the relationship to participating on the platform.

I don’t think a tool is going to do that. That’s culture, politics, company culture, and company ethics. The tool is not going to do that. The reason why I say that is you could select a perfect tool and the tool feature is not going to instill trust. I don’t think the best technology in the world with the entire best features is going to make the organization use it. […] Social business is not a field to dream. You don’t just install the tool and walk away from it. You understand the transformation that needs to take place in your company. [Patricia, UBS]

Likewise, because establishing trust is fundamentally an accumulative social process, the outcome of trust electronically created on the platform (rich profile approach) could differ from trust socially created outside the platform. Therefore, both were needed to sustain trust in this context.

I do look at profile quite a bit on both environments. I would say the levels of trust are different. Trust is hard to do by just looking at their profiles. If they trust you and you ask them to do something for you vise versa. Friendship and relationship, you have to have interactions. You have to initiate these things and learn by experiences [Daniel, UBS]

83 5.1.3 Trust in Content

Trust in information or content referred to users’ confidence in the contents or information posted on the social media tools. That is, the users sought to confirm the reliability of the contributed information. The findings showed that users accepted information posted about the author and information in the referendum as sufficient for confirmation purposes. As to the authorship, the users looked up the credentials of the author. As to the referendum, the users looked for the presence of collective acknowledgement in regard to particular contents/information.

The evidence showed that knowing who authored content matters to users’ confidence in the content; this is tied to users’ perceptions of the credibility of any person creating content. Therefore, trust in content is to a certain extent inherited from trust in people (see also Section 6.1.2 Trust in People). If a trusted user authored content, other users would be highly likely to trust it.

It comes down to who creates the content, first of all. [Daniel, UBS]

Basically, the users turned to the authoring user’s profile to look up the author’s professional experience and skills along with the existing relationship the users brought to the platform:

[I don’t think that something is official] on any particular document unless I see the author is the person who I know is assigned to a particular solution. Something surfaces in search results for cloud, and I know it came from the cloud practice director, and I probably know that now because of his name on it and I knew something about his responsibility in the organization and the responsibility he has, maybe I trust him a little bit more because I associate these couple things together. [Patricia, UBS]

Trust in content was also promoted through rich acknowledgement. Rich acknowledgement in this context is a collective means of acknowledging content by

84 using social media gaming features. At the case study companies, the gaming features were already embedded in the platform. Among these available gaming features were voting, ratings, liking, and even making a simple comment. The findings showed that rich acknowledgment was useful, at least on a personal level:

I think the liking and the rating are generally very good. Those are great proxies. The really good content will get rated well and liked, and it will show up that way. And I have found a very good correlation. If a content has been top-liked or top-rated it is generally meaningfully or useful. It may be not always useful for me, but in general. Particularly if it is rated by more than one person, I’m pretty confident that it’s something to be considered. [Brian, UBS]

If you are talking about how trust got built, there are couple different things. If you found someone giving expert, good, thought-provoking answers, you can follow them using of features of the system, and you can like the content. You can search the most liked content, just like the internet. [Gary, UBS]

In addition to playing a part in creating trust in content, gaming features also positively affected trust in the network and users’ self-sense-making. From this angle, participating in gaming features helped raise the dynamics of participation. Moreover, acknowledging new users was considered to constitute a reception or coaching. As a result, users were motivated to become more involved in the platform:

We have one feature that kind of answers. It’s called “thank you comment.” If I write a new request and I get the answer from you, I give a special comment like “thank you,” and this will be highlighted as a flower icon. I also have “like,” (Facebook), but “thank you” comment is something more personalized. It’s a way to bring two people that help each other, so it’s like “I value your contribution” through a flower icon. This is how we bring people together. [Robert, GES]

Certain kinds of acknowledgements helped the content author to confirm, review, and reconsider the relevance of the expertise to the knowledge subject. Through gaming

85 features, rich acknowledgment also triggered self-sense-making as a by-product of participation:

If lots of people are liking the content that I put out there (my stuff is being rated well or being liked often, or received comments often) which is the indicator that is relevant to me, it might be useful to know that. […] [Brian, UBS]

5.1.4 Functional Reputation

As illustrated above, trust factors were discovered in three dimensions. Also emerging overlaps resulted from the complex interplay between these trust factors: reliability of the system (content x network), community spirit (people x network), and user reputation (people x content) as displayed in figure 10. However, the discussion in this section focuses on the functional perspective of the reputation. In addition, the perspectives about reliability and community spirit were distributedly discussed in 5.1. Trust in Network and 5.1.3 Trust in Content.

Figure 10 Emerging Trust Interplays

Reputation is an intangible growth of organic, democratic, and user-generated ranking mechanism through social interaction, and this mechanism is unique to social media

86 platforms and not available in other traditional, formal collaborative platforms. By adding professional reputation into the enterprise’s compensation structure, this presents a unique opportunity for creating incentive programs for employees to make contribution to enterprise’s social media platform. The findings showed that reputation had influence upon a user’s voluntary fix of incomplete content or ongoing discussion on the platform. Community managers or “lifeguards” helped rescue an abandoned incomplete conversation by encouraging the subject matter experts to join the incomplete conversation (see also 5.1.1.3 Reception and Coaching). In so doing, the community managers or “lifeguards” used social ranking information, along with registered professional information on experts’ profiles. In addition, the findings implied that some employees perceived the reputation as a means to advance in career opportunity by making professional reputation more visible to their colleagues and executives.

5.2 Organic Arrangement

Being organic in this context means being flexible in regard to the platform’s ability to enable users to voluntarily build a community or group based on individual and collective interests. Therefore, there was a distinction between an organic group in the social media concept and a work-group computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) concept. Corroborated by users or experts in a particular subject of interest, the organic groups served the platform as a fundamental collective knowledge building block. In this regard, the importance of an organic network was its ability to transmit knowledge, without processing it, from individual to group, and ultimately to create a network accessible to everyone. Details are provided in the following subsections.

5.2.1 Organic Network

Traditional collaborative software, also known as groupware, though it does enable communication and collaboration, is task-oriented . Being explicitly task-oriented was preventing the group and the organization from achieving optimal organizational efficacy in the big picture because this focus essentially restricts communication, collaboration,

87 and information exchange within the group. Therefore, this focus was detrimental to efforts to innovate, as traditional collaborative software only allowed experts outside a given pre-defined group to join it in a top-down fashion.

Unlike traditional enterprise collaborative software, enterprise social media platforms allowed users to create groups and communicate freely. Therefore, employees were able to form cross-functional groups based on their interests, organic group, or knowledge network, in order to reach out and obtain diverse ideas or solutions in an organization- wide manner. More importantly, forming an organic group or knowledge network occurred in a completely bottom-up way. With rapid adoption rates, the case study companies enjoyed a new level of collaboration, as the number of the users who joined the forming organic groups was unexpectedly high.

To illustrate, in the first five months after launching BizGateway, UBS experienced unexpected organization-wide rapid adoption and participation. More than 25,000 users registered to the BizGateway, and approximately 2,100 organic groups formed based on users’ interests, both work-related groups and groups focused on water cooler-type topics. During this period, the activity rate was high. To illustrate, on average, 1 million pages were viewed and 150,000 activities took place each month. With BizGateway, users were able to reach out to experts and receive advice within two business days, whereas these processes could take up to 10 business days on average through traditional channels.

The less formal innovation, I think, comes more from people joining groups based upon areas of common interest, and they share ideas. I think innovation is pretty much building upon one idea on another, fertilizing one domain into another domain, adding things together, coming up with things new. That type of innovation is pretty much unstructured–even ad- hoc—that does occur to greater or lesser degree. [Brian, UBS]

Likewise, there were initially over 32,000 registered users on GES’s InnoMedia. The users were from 80 countries; forming over 10,000 heterogeneous knowledge networks

88 across industrial segments. These networks reached out to 400,000 GES viewers around the globe. The users were able to locate the experts and then establish contacts with them on the network by three conversation loops. Often, the experts were located in different divisions.

Actually we have some very nice success stories in that regard. Some of our employees on a project at a customer site were asked for things that they didn’t expect prior to that trip, so they were not able to prepared over night. Because of the geographic diversity, they got some recommendations on how to approach the issue, how to solve the problem. That actually impressed quite a few customers. We were able to leverage this kind of network to help them rather than taking classical approach like “let me get back to my people and I will come back to you in a week or two.” [William, GES]

5.2.1.1 Organic Group vs. Structured Work Group

An underlying concern in regard to organic networks was that it might threaten the organizational structure. However, organic networks were a logic layer created on an enterprise social media platform, and as such they ran parallel to the organizational and hierarchical structure. Therefore, organic groups on organic networks did not threaten to harm the organizational structure or its structured work groups.

Moreover, having organic networks greatly benefits formal structured work in term of knowledge discovery within an organization. In a social network analysis perspective, a strong-tie network is effective in knowledge diffusion while a weak-tie network is ideal for knowledge discovery/creation (Dyer & Nobeoka, 2000, 2002; Rowley, Behrens, & Krackhardt, 2000). From the findings, formal structured work groups reflected a strong- tied network topology whose members were well-connected, and therefore the information within the group was effectively circulated. On the other hand, an organic network reflected a weak-tied network topology whose members were loosely-connected, and therefore the network benefited from more diverse sets of knowledge and information intakes. The week-tie organic network could lead to knowledge discovery

89 and inventing creative solutions for a specific problem. In addition, this weak-tie organic network is capable of growing into a strong-tie network.

We have the structures. We have groups. We still can get information with the group just like posting the message in the related-context groups. […] Other applications on the platform such as microblogging are used to communicate across groups as well just like Yammer that share information and keeps it available for others. So, the social network platform doesn’t eliminate work groups; it helps communication across groups. In this case, we want the content to be available for everyone. This is our approach. [Robert, GES]

5.2.1.2 Closed Group

Drawn from the findings, another often-cited feature on the platform was the users’ ability to create a closed organic group. Through a closed link, the platform could provide communication transparency and, yet, communication privacy and safety.

[You] can start the discussion in InnoMedia by just asking the question. If it becomes closer and more detailed, you can shift the conversation into a closed group. That’s all definitely the requirement from all the users. [James, GES]

Being for the executive minds we don’t have to be worried about proprietary information reaching the wrong people. But this is also closing you off external networks. But people always run into both internal and external networks anyway. I would not see a corporate tool heavily emphasizing the external networking tools. [Matthew, UBS]

The closed group answered concerns over communication privacy and safety. Yet, it could also be a problematic tradeoff, as it could create an isolated island of knowledge by retarding information sharing and collaboration. However, joining a closed group was completely optional, and it was up to each user to consider whether to take advantage of this possibly mixed blessing.

90 Closed networks build trust among the participants, allow for conversations that couldn’t be had in public, and they give people a place to hang without having to deal with the great unwashed […] masses. From the other hand closed networks can be paralleled as black holes because all your data goes in but there’s no RSS out. They act as silos. Discussing issues and sharing ideas in a safe place along with ongoing participation from the same “kind” of experts do not allow innovation to flourish. [Jennifer, GES]

5.2.2 Organic Knowledge

Organic knowledge in this context refers to knowledge provided by users in the organic group on the organic network. The bottom line is that this organic arrangement was a sort of comfort feature designed to motivate users to channel their tacit knowledge and expertise into the explicit and implicit knowledge accessible to the group and thus the network. The comfort (factor) in this context referred to trust, which psychologically establishes “favorable conditions.” Therefore, users were motivated and willing to open up and set free their tacit knowledge or expertise without being forced to do so (Dodgson, 1993; Doz, 1996) and without perceiving the risk of opportunism (Inkpen & Tsang, 2005). .

5.2.2.1 Access to Tacit Knowledge

In essence, individuals brought both tacit and explicit knowledge into social interactions and communication (Nonaka, 1994; Nonaka & Krogh, 2009; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995; Nonaka, et al., 1996). They were encouraged to step forward and share more of their tacit knowledge when they perceived favorable conditions. Applied to the context of the enterprise social media platform, favorable conditions were satisfied by the trust environment, as described in Section 6.1 Social Capital Formation. In this regard, the users shared their tacit knowledge in their (organic) groups and thus with the (organic) networks while communicating on the platform. Consequently, their tacit knowledge was explicated and captured through underlying conversation or discussion.

91 In the domain of the industry, the pattern seems to be that we are becoming a much more geographically dispersed community of employees. My team members are in India, Spain, Germany, Vietnam, in DC metropolitan areas, or spread-out through the west coast of the US. It’s very hard to keep the team operating as a team. It’s kind of like individuals retreating into their silos [tacit knowledge reserve]. Social media is kind of helping manage the work and engage people to cooperate together, not to retreat in their own silos. That’s been the largest benefit from just looking at a team perspective. [Matthew, UBS]

The captured tacit knowledge became even more easily accessible to the network through the search mechanism and archival capacity provided on the platform.

We have that knowledge available to us now, but before it was locked in memories, in our heads [tacit knowledge reserve], the copy machines. And now we have a conversation that can be searched, can be found, can be clarified. People can come along a year later. It’s fun to see old faces come back to life because someone new comes along […] asks “hey what about this idea that you talked about a year ago.” [Christopher, UBS]

5.2.2.2 Breaking Isolated Knowledge Silos

As a company grows, simple processes such as communication and collaboration become more complex and could eventually prevent the company from optimally operating and flourishing. In addition, companies are themselves multidimensional when examined from different cultural and economic perspectives. Traditional computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) off-the-shelf or home-grown applications have been used in an attempt to tackle this problem. However, such an approach ends up creating even more complications and frustrations for users and for organizations, as the applications themselves create segregation in communication and collaboration, as shown in figure 11. The findings showed that segregation was associated with the multidimensional nature of the companies. Organizational and hierarchal, business process- and project- specific, and local, time, and cultural factors are the major elements that influenced the design of CSCW and the legacy groupware systems

92

Figure 11 Illustration of Retreating Island of Knowledge (Adapted from GES’s written presentation)

Unfortunately, the CSCW concept has played a role in creating isolated individual information systems. Unintegrated, underutilized, and untraceable, many such efforts were eventually abandoned. Unlike CSCW, the social media platform, at the heart of its design philosophy, embraces complexity by providing a flexible means of communication that collaboratively produces and shares knowledge.

There were a large number of intranet sites, but unfortunately no bridges between these islands of information. In many cases information could be completely isolated. The intranet for example lacked one entry point granting access to the entire network and information was found because individuals either knew where to look or were given direct links. [Jennifer, GES]

[It] is a way to break up some of the information silos, starting to move stuff out from people’s laptops, shared drives, individual department servers and into to a single social media platform to be exposed data or content that we were losing before because it just disappeared, or someone left the corporation, or it got lost and then got aged and not worthwhile anymore. But on a social media platform, there is a better chance to find information by full text searching. Matthew, UBS

5.2.3 Traversing the Organic Network

Organic knowledge was loosely captured in organic groups in organic networks. Therefore, to access certain knowledge or locate experts is to travel through the organic

93 network. Therefore, the ability to navigate easily is indispensable. However, information, from a design perspective, was not always presented in a consistent way. Therefore, traditional passive navigational schemes such as indexing and formal taxonomomies are no longer sufficient to cope with the growth and complexity of the organic network’s configuration or present-day business needs.

Folksonomy or (social) tagging is a dynamic, interactive, and collaborative classification approach that empowers users on social media platforms to navigate to the knowledge or the expert on an organic network. More importantly, the tagging model used a completely social and user-generated approach that, in essence, encapsulates feedback and feed- forward (Panke & Gaiser, 2009). Therefore, tagging was a revolutionary mechanism for organizing organic knowledge and harnessing complexity.

Tagging for me is about giving two or three keywords to classify a piece of content I publish. These keywords will be needed for search or profile label of the person who gives and reads the contents. The first step is about thinking about how I characterize this piece of information with three words. And I hope that all users do the same. Tagging is more and more important. [Robert, GES]

We have a kind of structured navigation enhancement that we put on the platform which makes use of the tagging model to provide another way of exposing important information. [...] It’s making use of dynamic correlated space from tags to get to the same kind of content linking with what we have on the portal. The social group is a collection of knowledge. You find the knowledge in the social group with using tagging model or full-texted search. You can come back in another way if you know the person. You can follow him in his social group and then pop back over to the content in the domain. [Matthew, UBS]

In addition, locating necessary information, either directly as already posted or indirectly as by consulting an expert, on the (organic) platform was different from searching for information over the Internet, as information on the organic platform was captured from network groups. Guided by folksonomy, a user could traverse the platform and locate the group in which the sought information could be found. By accessing the group, the user

94 could expect to receive not only the information sought but also a rich variety of additional content related to the information originally sought. The information was provided by (1) group members or experts who had the same interests, (2) relevant internal resources presented in blogs, forums, or document repositories, (3) relevant external resources, and (4) relevant groups and/or networks, etc. Therefore, searching on an organic network or social media platform provided a very rich experience for the user seeking information.

5.2.4 Decision Making Empowerment

The richness of available searchable information on the platform helps leverage users’ decision making and actions. Fundamentally, access to tacit knowledge is a fundamental step to take toward an innovation path for a company. According to the findings, tacit knowledge was made available for access and search, and therefore openly expanded the discussion and discourse over an extended period of time. Also, the richness of information in this regard resulted from informed distractions such as group members or experts who had the similar interests, relevant internal resources presented in blogs, forums, or document repositories, relevant external resources, relevant groups, and relevant networks. As a result, the platform helped accelerate the information acquisition process and facilitated decision making. Especially in a distributed environment, the richness of the information and the informed distractions helped (new) participants to get on board very quickly and efficiently.

[Social media at GES] makes shared data, information and in-depth experience available in real time, offers decision support tools to help employees analyze and make decisions faster, decentralizes decision- making and let solutions evolve through collaboration, leading to higher productivity. […] User intelligence and community input raises the success rate. [Jennifer, GES]

Besides accelerating the decision making process, the information richness and the informed distractions helped the information seekers to transition their information

95 search mental models from active-searching, to passive-exploring, and to passive discovering. Therefore, the users were able to expand their decision making paths for diversified and novel solutions for a specific problem.

5.3 Vernacular Collaboration Protocols

The organic arrangement has opened up opportunities for the enterprise to exploit uncharted communication schemes. The collapse of (i) organizational and hierarchal, (ii) business process- and project-specific, and (iii) local, time, and cultural barriers also increased the speed of collaboration. Once an individual enters the social media platform, the social order becomes grounded and the organizational hierarchy levels out to some extent. As a result, users perceived themselves as part of a bigger ecology in regard to the organic network and the organization as a whole.

5.3.1 Leveled Communication and Collaboration

The findings showed that potential users became more interested in participating on the platform when they expected to meet a level of fairness and equality in the ways communication took place. Social media flattened the organizational barriers in three dimensions (see also Section 6.2.2.2 Breaking Isolated Knowledge Silos). One of these was organizational and hierarchal barriers, which generate friction as information was traveling either in a top-down or a bottom-up direction. In this regard, the information or message on the social media traveled on a leveled plane.

The way in which social media works – placing all users on an equal footing – means reduced control for communicators and leaders. Employees become equal partners in the communication process and are invited to take part in a conversation and share information, rather than have information pushed at them. Our use of technology inside organizations has changed from “top-down” to “side-to-side”. Side-to- side communication is all about conversation and involvement: two important characteristics of social media. [Jennifer, GES]

96 Collaboration on the platform so far has become less formal and unstructured due the leveled communication structure, a structure that is implicated in the virtual disappearance of communication friction. This benefited the innovation process at the front end because all idea activities are inherently very uncertain. In this regard, social media logically supported the innovation process by nourishing front-end dynamics in an adaptive collaborative environment.

I think innovation is pretty much building one idea on another, fertilizing one domain into another domain, adding things together, coming up with new things. For that type of innovation is pretty much unstructured even —ad hoc —that does occur to greater or lesser degree. […] A good example is I have seen UBS approach the development of cloud as an emerging model for managing the data center and the service. There has been a great deal of conversation of what cloud is, what it means, how we can go to the market with this. Those kind of things, conversations, become the foundation for innovation in building or repositioning us as a consulting and service provider in a very rapidly changing marketplace. [Brian, UBS]

5.3.2 Participatory Affordance

Certain social media applications come with less participatory cost, which in turn encourages users to access the platform during off hours. The findings showed that users participated in Microblogging, a social media application, outside of office-hours 25 . Microblogging refers to a form of blogging that allows users to broadcast brief text updates that can be viewed by anyone or by groups approved by the users. Among Microblogging tools, Twitter was the predominant application.

25 Since the introduction of automated and computerized technology in the late 1970’s, many studies based on the balance of work and life have confirmed that such technology, especially computerized and communication technologies, has an impact on the quality of work, quality of life, employment, and management (Agarwal & Ferratt, 1998, 2000; Attewell & Rule, 1984; Karimi, et al., 2007; Moore & Love, 2005; Nelson, 1990; Niederman & Crosetto, 1999; Niederman, Moore, & Yager, 1999; Niederman, Sumner, & Carl P. Maertz, 2006; Paré, Tremblay, & Lalonde, 2000; Patrickson, 1986; Picot, et al., 2008; Ryssel, 2004; van Eijnatten & Vos, 2002; Wu, et al., 2006). In addition, advanced instant mobile communication technologies have brought another complicated dimension to work and life issues (Ling & Pedersen, 2005; Spiegelman & Detsky, 2008). For instance, instant mobile communication gadgets (e.g., the iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, and other handheld devices) have already blurred the boundary between work and life (Batt & Valcour, 2003; Chesley, Moen, & Shore, 2003; Valcour & Hunter, 2005) and render a work-life conflict (Boswell & Olson-Buchanan, 2007). Therefore, the researcher expected to see particular features of social media and social software applications blur the boundary between work and life given personal and work-related uses. However, such a work-life balance issue was undetectable in this study.

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At GES, Twitter and Yammer were among the popular Microblogging tools. These tools became popular because of the informal nature of their communication channels. The users were not constrained by particular networks in terms of the style of their posts. By investigating the pattern of GES’s internal Twitter activities, the researcher found that communication through Microblogging dramatically increased during off-office hours, especially from 4 p.m. in the afternoon to 1 a.m. in the morning. A central reason for the users’ behaviors was that they may have perceived the Microblogging tools as constituting only a minimal invasion into their personal lives and the personal lives of others. As result, Microblogging increased communication frequency because it required little effort to use. Therefore, the barrier to participation was much lower, than for other social media software applications on the platform.

[Microblogging] helps to separate the business stream (mailbox) from the knowledge stream. It increases the communication frequency compared to full blogs as the barrier is much lower (less time required) and increases the private/collaboration/social aspect which is important for globally distributed teams. This generates a digital activity stream which helps to identify implicit knowledge of experts [ Jonathan, GES]

5.4 Elastic Governance

Control over social media is necessary in any corporate environment, though it exists in non-traditional forms. However, a traditional tight control mechanism may prevent the platform from functioning in a way that is optimally usable and useful. For example, Wiki engines have been studied and cited extensively as a very successful collaborative publishing tool. Yet, recent studies found that Wiki engines for sharing knowledge within a company were sub-optimally utilized due to corporate policies (Holtzblatt, 2010), and this could also affect participation (Chui, Miller, & Roberts, 2009). In this regard, there were concerns about corporate control (Levy, 2009). Therefore, while supporting business operations, the social media administration had to be congruent with the characteristics of the platform. The findings showed that trust-

98 based governance, community-based surveillance, and passive controls were the effective approaches to governing enterprise social media platforms.

5.4.1 Trust-Based Control

In effect, trust-based control is made possible by institutional-based trust. 26 In this context, institutional-based trust was a collective reflection of social capital on the platform (trust in network, people, and network). With this trust, users assumed that no one on the network had ill intentions toward anybody else there.

We have some regulation; we also have social media guidelines. But using it in the right way, it’s the matter of trust, and it’s not the matter of regulation. [James, GES]

Therefore, instead of imposing hard policies on and exerting control over the users, the case study companies decided to rely on trust. Although corporate electronic communication policies may come into the process of exercising trust-based control, such policies had to be communicated and implemented in a relatively relaxed way.

One of the big items was to just start treating people like they are professional, stop giving the rules, and give them very loosely-formed guidelines: be respectful to each other, each other’s opinion; help other when you can; don’t do anything stupid because you are on the stage with 90,000 other people. We wanted them to be light-hearted. If you see someone is doing something stupid, be respectful in the way that you correct them. We have those simple guidelines. [Gary, UBS]

But once you are already in InnoMedia, there are not too many restrictions. It’s like a self-regulating system; letting it open as much as possible, so everyone is allowed to create groups and post something. Of course, there are administrators who take care of posting and so on. So far, there have never been some bad behaviors. I think this may be the difference between social media platform over the internet and in the enterprise. Within a company, normally you do things useful, good, and

26 Discussion about institutional-based trust is provided in section 2.5.2.1.

99 making sense so as not to offend someone, comparing with Facebook and others on the internet. [David, GES]

5.4.2 Community-Based Surveillance

In terms of asking users to follow any given electronic communication guidelines, the findings showed that the community-based approach was effective. Community-based surveillance refers to a collective action whereby all community members look after each other. Certain features such as “flag” or “report” were embedded in the platform. The users were able to exercise theses feature when they ran across a suspected malicious message or activity that could potentially compromise the community or the company.

We also have other stuff like the monitoring; people can identify a piece of content that is unacceptable (flag). After being flagged for three times, it comes up to the administrator for the decision. [Matthew, UBS]

5.4.3 Passive Control

Executives’ participation in the platform benefited not only adoption but also helped maintain a desirable participatory atmosphere on the platform. As the users perceived that their executives and managers also participated in the platform, the users became courteous and behaved when interacting with each other.

Our corporate users are not only workers, but the management also can participate. So that’s the positive side of this. That’s more endorsement and encouragement factors, so motivating people to participate because this is the platform where they can get responses from the CEO etc. At the same time, the fact that the management is present in this platform in our experience has led to the “passive control.” […] This is the fact that people know that managers are also using the platform and looking at things etc. This seems to make sure that people don’t go overboard and use this tools organizes nasty matters. [William, GES]

100 5.4.4 Corporate Social Media Policy

For the company, explicit control is still strategically required by business practice to ensure that goals relating to social media use and overall corporate goals are congruent.

5.4.4.1 Incremental Policies

The findings across the case study companies showed that the companies extended their existing corporate (electronic) communication policies rather than creating a new policy for accommodating the social media platform. In general, information security and privacy policies were reviewed and then subjected to revisions and updates in order to accommodate the social media platform:

Existing IT policies should be reviewed and updated to include social networking tools and applications. The scope of such efforts should examine policies related to code-of-conduct, code-of ethics, employee behavior, and any other procedure manuals that discuss “appropriate use of technology.” This effort should also examine (and update accordingly) policies related to employee use […] Given a lack of industry experience and refinement of best practices, governance programs (when implemented), are better off being centralized, at least initially. It is also clear that social networking initiatives do not have a clear single owner over the effort. Multiple business groups are likely to be involved, such as HR, legal, audit, and corporate communications, in addition to having the IT organization represented. [Jennifer, GES]

This incremental approach suited the nature of the platform well, as the social media platform was still evolving, and many features and capabilities were yet to come. Thus, creating a new policy for the platform was not practical and would have been a waste of effort as new functions were being added. In this regard, implementing a social media policy in an incremental way was sufficient to cope with the dynamics of the platform.

101 We have processes in place; most companies ought to have that as well. The tool is a new tool, yes, but we don’t just invent the policy to support a new tool. You leverage existing process and existing stakeholders who own the responsibility in our organization. So, our job was to re-engage with those stakeholders and partner with them early, advise them of the new service that we plan on putting up, and to work through their processes, and educate them, answer questions, and assure that if there is any policy to be updated, make sure that the new language got added appropriately whether it would be in term of service or policies [Patricia, UBS]

5.4.4.2 Localization

Being a multinational company adds a further challenge to corporate policy making, as any policy must take account of heterogeneous geo-political climates. In this context, the major challenges were national labor-related regulations and laws. Regarding the findings, certain European countries treated workers’ privacy and rights very seriously, and the elected work councils had the power to negotiate with the management on everything that impacted the work environment. In this regard, corporate electronic communication policy makers had to accommodate the work council’s concerns.

In Germany, we have work council; it’s kind of like bargaining unit for a union. Basically, all German employees are entitled to representation to a formal group that the law requires that all the companies have to have. The council body is elected body whose purpose is to negotiate with management things like union, working, pay rate, workplace issue, and safety issue. The goal of the work council is to make sure that the workers are treated fairly and not exploited. [George, UBS]

Findings showed that the concerns were taken seriously and finally reflected in policy making. Certain features such as news feeds, live feeds (RSS), or activity streams could be problematic. These features could be used against the employees as they could reveal the content of work and how the employees spent their time. To tackle this issue, certain functionality or features on the platform noted above were optional for users in certain regions.

102 First of all, the worker counsel in Germany is different from the one in the US. So, the biggest input comes from the worker counsel. We have a lot of concerns about activity streams, the Wiki (who changes the article the most), who is active on the platform. They are afraid the managers will use this tool to monitor the quality and the work. So this is the biggest concern. [James, GES]

The work council takes a very dim view of BizGateway. Because in Germany, it’s not legal for managers to demand to know what employees are doing every minute of every day all day long while they are at work. It’s illegal for Germany companies to track the content of employees’ emails. […] It’s possible that if they were able to see what people are doing all day they, the mid-level manager, would expect that in a negative way, punish people if they saw something different that what they were assigned to do. [George, UBS]

5.5 Chapter Summary

This chapter discusses the findings along with the development of the framework used in this research. Each theoretical component in the framework was examined and updated in accord with the findings: social capital formation, organic arrangement, vernacular collaboration protocol, and administration and control. The social capital formation incorporated trust in the network, trust in people, and trust in content. The organic arrangement encompassed the organic network and organic knowledge. The vernacular collaborative protocol was constituted by the leveled communication, unstructured collaboration, and participatory affordance. And the elastic governance covered trust- based control, community-based surveillance, passive control, and corporate social media policy. All these components were addressed through the complex adaptive system lens and taken into account in updating the research framework originally discussed in Chapter 3.

103 Chapter 6: Discussion

This research was motivated by the need to understand how the social media platform was domesticated and used for internal collaboration and innovation. The case studies were built on an exploration of two sustainable enterprise social media software applications. Guided by complex adaptive systems theory (along with social capital theory, knowledge management theory, and social technical systems theory), two interpretive case studies were conducted to investigate how an enterprise accommodates the social media platform to support idea generation, brainstorming, and concept development at the front end of the innovation process. This dissertation research developed two case studies to examine two very successful multinational companies, one in information technology services industry and the other in industrial conglomerates through interviews and documentation reviews. This chapter provides a discussion of the important findings of the research given the responses to the research objective, the research framework, and the research questions.

6.1 Research Objective Revisited

The results revealed how the case companies accommodated the social media platform. While slackly imposing control (i.e., elastic governance) on the users, the case companies allowed , embraced , and harnessed certain kinds of emerging complexity (i.e., social capital formation, organic arrangement, and vernacular collaborative protocol) in individual and organizational levels of analysis. In this regard, the social media platform was considered suitable because it had certain characteristics that were compatible with the communicative and collaborative behaviors in the ideation process where information was not complete and uncertainty was high.

In addition to the guidance offered by the research objective, the questions that the researcher returned to throughout the course of conducting the research were these: “What is the functional goal of the platform?” And “What is the social media platform?”

104 Toward the end of the research, the researcher gradually, but strongly, perceived that the platform itself did not have goals or objectives, but that people within the enterprise did . People turned the platform to use in accordance with their own objectives. Likewise, the case companies aligned the platform with their business plans and goals to support and enhance their corporate operations. Therefore, before putting the platform into use, a company had to have a business plan and policy in place. At the heart of a successful social media platform is a vision for the way that the platform supports and compliments the enterprise’s goals.

“What is the social media platform?” As previously noted, the platform should reflect and support the company’s objectives and the user’s individual goals in order to be sustainable. In other words, the platform could be anything as long as it was congruent with the stated goals. Therefore, the platform, to put it simply, is in essence a utility that has the power of application.

6.2 Refined Research Framework

Guided by complex adaptive systems, knowledge management theories, social capital theories, social technical systems, and intelligence and organizational innovation, the initial research framework presented in Chapter 3 was modified to incorporate the key findings of this research. The refined research framework is shown in figure 12.

The refined research framework model has three connected layers, all under the umbrella of the elastic governance sphere. First, the fundamental layer is the social capital formation, which encompasses three components of trust: trust in people, trust in the network, and trust in content. In this layer the primary focus is the individual and their willingness to participate and to have confidence in the content of the social media platform. Second, given social capital formation, organic arrangement is fostered. As a result, the organic network emerges and generates the organic knowledge within itself. This aspect emphasized the informal but complimentary nature of social media as it supports the more traditional hierarchy.

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Third, the vernacular collaborative protocol is affected by the interactions among the organic networks and the diffusion of organic knowledge. Vernacular collaboration is made possible by the leveled communication, the unstructured collaboration, and the participatory affordance facilitated by the platform, and the vernacular collaboration. Through such means, it is possible for innovation to occur. Here, we see how the platform supports non-linear thinking which is critical to the front end of the innovation process.

Figure 12 Refined Framework for Enterprise Social Media in Support of Innovation

In addition, in the corporate context, it is necessary to have control over the environment. All the layers are subject to the elastic governance sphere. However, elastic governance offers greater freedom than stricter protocols do, as the former recognizes the motivations and needs of the individual users. Therefore, elastic governance is reflected in trust-based control, community-based surveillance, and passive control.

106 6.3 Research Question 1

The first research question was to investigate “Does social media influence individual information search behavior at the FFE of the innovation process?” Does the design of the social media platform affect emergent behavior? Do social media tools influence what the individual searches for or how he/she searches for it?

The answer was jointly captured in the vernacular collaborative protocol and the organic arrangement of the platform.

The work-related information in the context of this question referred to (i) the content and (ii) the expert. The content and/or expert, however, functioned in particular group(s) on the network. To find the content and/or expert, the user traverses the network to locate the group in which the content and/or expert were located. Having accessed the group, the user was exposed to rich information about the group such as the group members, topics, other relevant groups, etc. The user was given opportunities to explore information related to the content and/or the expert the user had originally been looking for.

Therefore, the emerging behavior of searching was extended to search scenarios by further browsing through rich information existing in the group. This is fundamentally different from searching on Google or other search engines on the Internet which are concerned only with textual information. An important element of social media is its ability to transition active search to passive discovery by providing context specific informed distractions.

6.4 Research Question 2

The second research question was to examine “Can the dynamic information flows and interactions facilitated by social media be adequately captured by more formal KM systems?”

107 The answer was that social media was better than formal KM in facilitating the dynamic information flows and interactions because of the functional nature of social media. First, the social media platform allowed an organic arrangement that helped individuals with greater freedom to orient themselves more toward information flows in a way that went beyond their original interest. This facilitated individuals’ efforts to pursue the information they needed. Second, the collapse of hierarchy and the multidimensionality of the organization accelerated the speed of communication and collaboration among the individuals. Third, search and interaction was no longer confined to predictable interactions and information access that might be anticipated a priori by the participants role or position in the organization. However, with that said, formal knowledge management was indispensible. This was because knowledge management remained the corporate jewel vault of the company.

6.5 Research Question 3

The third research question was to investigate “How should social media platforms be designed to reflect business goals and individual needs?” The answer was “we mean business, but people run the business.”

First, the platform did not have goal by itself. A company has to align the platform (the design and the implementation) with its business plan and goals to ensure that the platform actually supported the business operation. Moreover, the platform was put in place in accordance with the company’s business plan and goals; it was needed to push adoption and participation. A platform untethered from business goals becomes little more than a curiosity over time.

Second, while the platform was for the essence of the business: the business was run by people. Therefore, the design and implementation had to take into the human factor into account. To this end, embedding certain entertainment features was considered necessary. For example, allowing users to participate in the platform for non-work-related purposes psychologically benefited the existing and prospective users as trust emerged from

108 lighthearted interactions and conversations. As a consequence, the users brought trust back into work-related activities on the platform. This apparently frivolous use of the platform actually strengthened its ability to support more serious business goals.

Third, in the governance perspective, it was essential for the designers to recognize basic human psychology. People want to be treated with respect and dignity. Imposing overly restrictive rules and policies on people may produce negative outcomes. Instead, elastic control is the preferred governance mechanism – implementing trust-based, community- based surveillance and passive control afforded users a degree of freedom that helped motivate them, especially knowledge workers, to share their knowledge and expertise on the network.

6.6 Research Question 4

The fourth research question was to examine “Can social media platforms leverage individual psychological motivations such as trust? The answer focused on the self- evolvement of trust in social capital formation.

Trust on the platform comprised trust in the network, trust in people, and trust in content. At the beginning, the network did not exist; therefore, neither did trust in the network nor trust in the content. However, the people were already there interacting and working off- platform. The possibility that people may already have developed relationships and trust in people was high. Once people migrated to the platform, they tended to continue their existing relationships through the networks they built and the content they created. In essence, the social media platform leveraged and then extended existing relationships and the trust that had already been developed.

As time passed, the trust was interconnectedly distributed from people to the network, to the content, and thus to the entire platform. Increased trust in any component on the platform positively raised the trust in regard to all these aspects. Over time, the re-

109 regeneration of trust on the platform was manifested in a self-evolving fashion as depicted in figure 13.

Figure 13 Self-Evolving Trust

6.7 Chapter Summary

This chapter, first, gives a brief discussion of the objective of this research, followed by a discussion focused on the refined research framework. Each research question is discussed and corresponding answers proposed. First, the mechanism of the information flow between corporate and external social platforms was simply considered as a corporate selective response. Second, the emerging behaviors that occurred during an individual’s search for information was discussed in the research framework, particularly in regard to the vernacular collaborative protocol and organic arrangement components. Third, the necessity of accommodating the platform in order to thrive in terms of electronic communication and collaboration to facilitate the emergent behavior meant prioritizing the business operation but also recognizing the human factor. Fourth, trust (in network, people, and content) was re-generated through self-evolving social capital formation.

110 Chapter 7: Conclusion

This chapter concludes the research by discussing the study’s contributions, implications, and limitations, as well as future research direction.

7.1 Contributions of the Research

7.1.1 Contribution to Exploration

In essence, this research explored enterprise social media for innovation by developing two case studies and formulating a framework that collectively captures the complex characteristics of the phenomenon. This phenomenon is considered confidential and business-sensitive. It is also a new area for interdisciplinary research. Therefore, the area is underexplored. Gaining consent to study potentially proprietary approaches was a challenge and the richness of the case study interviews provides unique insights that have yet to be reported. However, the researcher was confronted with the challenge of arising from the still very limited access to the phenomenon afforded by the participating companies. To overcome this challenge, it was necessary for the researcher to consult additional sources of information, such as press releases, product releases, and presentation documents.

7.1.2 Contribution to Theory

This research made contributions to both extending existing theories into emerging interdisciplinary areas and to translating these theories into practical applications. First, this research implemented complex adaptive systems theory by incorporating knowledge management theory, social capital theory, and social technical theory to formulate the framework used to explore how social media is domesticated and utilized for innovation processes at the front end. This research contributes to this research area by collectively capturing emerging behaviors on the platform. The main findings were drawn from the

111 nature of the complex interactions among people, information, and the platform as a socio-technical artifact. Most of the studies on social media have focused on the technical potential of the platform, rather than on the social dynamics on the platform. These studies, therefore, present incomplete renditions of and explanations for the problems, solutions, and opportunities arising from social media. The theoretical framework offered in this research is fully committed to a social technical perspective through a complex adaptive systems lens and offers a compelling and applicable way to contextualize the results of this research. Prior to this study, complex interactions had hardly been studied, translated, and analyzed using a complex adaptive systems lens from a socio-technical perspective.

Second, this research empirically challenges a traditional wisdom that trust could be instilled only through social interactions in the physical world. This research shows that social capital can be electronically developed in a self-evolving manner through and among different typologies of trust components: people, networks, and content. While categorized into three components, these trust components overlap and affect one another. Trust can be cultivated and nourished by deploying certain technical features, but this needs committed efforts to fuel the formation and the development of trust on the platform.

Third, this research challenges the efficacy of knowledge management as the best approach to capture information and knowledge in the age of Web 2.0. The findings implied that KM was best for managing corporate jewels (e.g. patents, intellectual properties) because of its formality, secure enquiry protocol, access control, and non- interactive mode of access. Unlike the social media approach, the KM approach is considered not agile enough to keep up with two-way, interactive communication and collaboration in brainstorming and ideation processes. This is because KM at the heart is designed to manage rather than capture the knowledge. As a result, KM is not a viable approach to capture knowledge especially in the front end of innovation process where the uncertainty is high. In other words, KM is intended to manage while social media is intended to harvest .

112 7.2 Practical Implications of the Research

7.2.1 Implications for Executives and Managers

While social media is generally considered to be a bottom-up tool, this research suggests that its ultimate success is tightly tied to both strategic and tactical initiatives that executives and managers undertake. It is the traditional role of these executives and managers to establish a vision and to set policies that govern the way that this vision is achieved. With social media these traditional roles need to be modified.

Vision is still very important, and this vision is set at the executive level. It is very important for a visionary leader to be able to recognize and then respond to emerging opportunities quickly in order to be a trendsetter. In this regards, GES and UBS were considered early enterprise social media adopters, and this reflected the executives’ leadership which was important for an enterprise to become and then stay innovative. From the findings, GES’s and UBS’s executives were early on able to recognize the potential and the power of social media for enterprise use. The executives enthusiastically responded to the opportunity quite immediately by reaching out for other executives who shared the vision about enterprise social media for collaboration and innovation. As a result, these executives became champions of the social media platform. They developed a preliminary social media initiative proposal, and then discussed the idea with their top senior executive management. Once they had support from their top executive management, they developed a mature business case for enterprise social media platform by aligning the design and the implementation of the enterprise social media platform with the company’s goals and top senior management’s vision.

It is also important that the executives and manager have patience to let the platform and its participants develop within a framework that is flexible. As for corporate control perspective, it is necessary for managers to realize that they may have to surrender control to a certain extent in order to allow behaviors to emerge that may have the potential to drive better communication, collaboration, and thus innovation. Also, a

113 change in perspective on control, risk, and opportunity may be warranted. Risk presents an opportunity; therefore, to limit risk to a great extent is to disallow opportunity. Executives and managers instead of focusing on control might do better to concentrate on coaching and guiding. Taken together, trust-based control, community-based surveillance, and passive control are proven approaches.

Finally, this research suggests that in addition to the strategic, vision setting role of executives and managers, there is a less obvious, but equally important tactical role. Executives and managers play an important part in the early socialization of the platform by actively participating in the platform in a hands-on manner. The findings suggest that executive and manager participation and active engagement contributes to better governance through demonstrated behaviors and that it also promotes participation.

7.2.2 Implications for Users

Because users have already been exposed to so many social media applications for personal use and business use on the Internet, they tend to bring their personal experiences, expectations, and habits to an enterprise social media platform. In entering a corporate social media environment, users may need to educate themselves about how to make good use of a platform in this context. In the enterprise context, users must understand how their interests are related to the company goals. They must also appreciate how social media accelerates the transformation of search from active exploration to passive discovery. This is essential to the success of the front end of the innovation process.

Users must to explore and experiment with the functionality and usability that the platform has to offer. No platform is automatically useful in itself. Users must be creative and re-invent how to exploit the resources on the platform for supporting and improving their work. While top down visioning and support are important, ultimately it is the way that the users actually engage the platform that results in value. Experimentation is key to identifying unanticipated contributors to value.

114

Finally, users must understand their role in providing peer governance and in creating a culture of active participation. This includes contributing to discussions, contributing to incomplete information, correcting incorrect information, and commenting on general conversation threads.

7.2.3 Implications for Designers

Implementing an enterprise social media platform poses challenges for designers. First, designers must align the platform with the company objectives and business goals. This can be achieved by creating use cases or business cases to ensure that the company makes the best use of the platform. For example, a business case should have, but not be limited to, a project objective; a targeted audience; strategic, tactical, and operational plans; a road map; expected outcomes, etc. Interesting, however, it is only through use – and system evolution – that the full potential value of the system can be realized. In an enterprise where social medial is being used to support innovation, the value of weak ties is known, but the actual way in which those weak ties develop is not necessarily predictable up front.

Second, it is essential that the designers have an understanding of the complex, adaptive nature of the platform and how to allow and cultivate emerging behaviors. Overly restrictive rules could kill the desired emerging behaviors. For example, creating or updating content on Wiki-like applications should not require permission from managers, as it costs the user more effort that will undoubtedly be perceived as unnecessary and unproductive. In this regard, designers may have to work closely with executives, managers, and other policy makers in order to optimally deploy the platform. Overly restrictive policies on platform use will reduce participation over time and limit the platform’s ability to accommodate the very emergent behavior it hopes to promote in its quest for innovation.

115 Third, successful platform implementation and deployment are only half the battle. The designers have to invent schemes to push adoption, to encourage participation, and to coach and guide the users. Occasional, but consistent, campaigns and promotions are necessary to remind users of the existence of the platform. For instance, recounting “success stories” is one way of promoting the platform to users. Designers also need to communicate with executives and managers and create plans for their early and active involvement in the platform.

Fourth, should appreciate that what appears to be frivolous use of the platform actually is a building block in the overall adoption of and belief in the platform. Additionally, game elements such as liking and ratings are important in helping to build credibility of content and ultimately can be used to help users identify the “best information.”

Fifth, the platform itself should never be regarded as finished, as it is an emerging and evolving entity. The designers may need to keep up with the technology and improve the technical functionality and features of the platform over time in order to benefit the users and, thus, nurture the desired emerging behaviors. For example, it is not harmful to experiment with new features and functionality because the community will ultimately test, generate feedback, and approve or disapprove it by using it or not doing so. New technical features will continue to be available. And, routinely eliciting and analyzing user feedback can help the designers keep up with evolving requirements that reflect how the next generation platform should be designed.

7.2.4 Implications for Enterprise

What could potentially prevent enterprise social media from optimal performance is the enterprise itself. Organizational architecture (work structure and compensation structure) could be a deterrent for an enterprise to fully explore the platform and enjoy the result. Strategically, organization architecture, particularly work structure, should recognize social media participation as part of the employee work routine. Tactically, this can be achieved by adding professional reputation compensation into the enterprise’s

116 compensation structure together with creating incentive programs for employees to make contribution to enterprise’s social media platform. Operationally, the appraisal of individual contribution also can be obtained by drawing upon social media’s gaming feature (or rich acknowledgement) such as liking, rating and ranking, giving comments, and tagging.

More importantly, what makes a company great is vision, and vision does not belong only to the executives and managers, but collectively to all the stakeholders. The results signify that companies that make extensive use of the platform tend to have higher expectations for and a clearer vision of the future of the platform. GES’s and UBS’s social media platforms are not only advanced with rich features, they are embedded in users’ work lives. Therefore, GES and UBS are exposed to the functionality and usability of the platform. As a comparison, GlobalPharma Corporation’s vision is still hoping to achieve this (see table 5).

Vision for the Social Media Platform GES UBS GPC Vision for Accessibility
Vision for Higher Degree of Engagement


Vision for Leveraging Organizational Intellectual Capacity


Vision for Management Participation
*
Vision for Open Access
Vision for Personalization and Customization
Vision for Platform Coverage
* Vision for Platform Integration


Vision for Platform Migration
Vision for Searching Mechanism

Vision for Technical Feature Enhancement

Vision for Transparency

= vision for, * = already implemented

Table 5 Vision for the Enterprise Social Media Platform

As stated, the vision for the platform is important because it indicates how an enterprise implements and makes use of the platform and how an enterprise will derive benefits from the platform. The users with a clearer vision tend to have comprehensive views of

117 how the technology shapes the business and how the business shapes the technology. At this point, what makes a company great in its use of the platform is its vision. The vision is not about what the platform can do in general, but what the platform can do to specifically support work, business operations, and organizational goals at the front end of the innovation process.

7.2.5 Implications for Perspective Adopter

Social media presents unique opportunities for communication and collaboration in three facets: platform scalability, information acquisition, and democratic architecture. First, scalability among social medial software applications is very high since social media software applications adopt Web 2.0 technology which emphasizes synchronicity and inter-connectivity by providing open and transparent APIs to connect among social media applications. Therefore, social media platform is capable of expanding and integrating with any not-yet-to-come social media applications and features.

Second, enterprise social media introduces a new paradigm for information acquisition to information seekers. As an information seeker is look up for certain information on an organic network, she encounters informed distractions such as group members or experts who had the same interests, relevant internal resources presented in blogs, forums, or document repositories, relevant external resources, relevant groups and/or networks, etc. These informed distractions drive the information seeker to be further engaged with different information acquisition mental models ranging from active-searching, to passive-exploring, and to passive discovering. In this regard, social media gives richer and relevant search results as well as richer search experience to the information seekers. From an innovation perspective this may be one of the most important aspects of well- conceived social media platforms – they appear to accelerate behaviors that have been proven to add value at the exploration phase.

Third, in contrast to formal knowledge management, social media platform espouses a democratic approach that increases the usefulness of the information through social

118 interactions. In this regard, all the users have an equal right to exercise their voice or content on the platform, and this has already been witnessed through democratic mechanisms provided by the platform. For example, folksonomy or tagging is a democratic mechanism to classify information (contents, people, networks) on the platform that is jointly co-authorized by participants themselves. In addition, gaming features (i.e. rating, liking, giving comments, voting) support democratic, reputation- based mechanisms to validate, verify, and evaluate a piece of information, and this is individually authorized by the participants themselves.

7.3 Limitations of the Research

Any research study has limitations, and the present study is no exception. For this research, it should first be noted that little formal theory currently exists in regard to building a framework for enterprise social media platforms. The theoretical underpinnings are borrowed from other disciplines, and this requires translation across the context. Moreover, what is known about social media as it supports personal interactions has only limited translation to the enterprise environment.

Second, the generalizability 27 of the findings must be considered. The findings offered in this research are drawn from and based on small data sets collected from two case companies. Although the findings can be generalized to the theory, they cannot be assumed to be applicable to a wider population of companies beyond the realm of knowledge workers in high tech industries. All of the participants were considered knowledge workers in knowledge-intensive working environments. As a consequence, the findings and the contribution to practice may be relevant only to very similar contexts.

27 Limitations in this research occur from the methodology chosen, subjective bias, and generalizability of the study. There are two types of subjective biases, the interviewee’s bias and the researcher’s bias. Subjective bias is inherent in interpretive qualitative research (Creswell, 2009) (p. 196), the study’s limitation however is confined to five premises: openly acknowledging and articulating the researcher’s role and assumption in the study; adopting self-reflection approach and using rich description to covey the findings; triangulating interpretation using multiple theories and data sources; (in) ongoing dialogue with the subjects for member checking; and, engaging in active dialogue with committee members and other peers during the research process.

119 Third, the researcher was limited by non-disclosure agreements (NDA). The case companies wanted the researcher to keep their social media application’s specific details, including screen shots, confidential. In addition, the researcher was not allowed to have direct access to the systems as they contain certain sensitive information that the companies did not wish to share. Therefore, visual information about the social media applications could not be presented in this dissertation.

Fourth, data were collected through telephone and interviews. The researcher could not capture non-verbal clues such as emotion or the situated environment where the phenomenon took place. In addition, this research is not a longitudinal study. It is more like a snapshot. Individual users were not observed interacting with the system directly.

While all of these limitations are important, the use of social media within the enterprise to support innovation is an emerging field where little is currently available to determine best practice, or even to identify common patterns. This research is a first step at identifying critical factors that contribute to participation, use, knowledge sharing and value to the enterprise.

7.4 Future Research

The first item on a future research agenda may properly focus on developing a theoretical framework. As manifested in this research, complex adaptive systems theory delivers a powerful research framework for exploring and investigating the phenomenon. Therefore, future research could further examine the constructs of the complex adaptive theory in order to strengthen this framework, which has descriptive, rhetorical, inferential, and application powers. Specifically, additional work is warranted around the relationship between individual experience and contributions to the content and the notion of feed forward – How do current activities enhance or constrain future opportunities? In addition, how does participation evolve? In other words, how do the system’s features enhance or constrain the fluid participation which is characteristic of other complex adaptive systems?

120

Another research direction is to develop a grounded theory by conducting an interpretive, longitudinal, ethnographic case study to extensively explore emerging behaviors on the platform. Although the findings fulfilled the objective of the study and satisfied the question, the researcher speculates that there are still undiscovered, very rich emerging behaviors underlying the complexity. A longitudinal ethnographic study would help show how emerging behaviors evolve and what the pattern of emerging behaviors looks like; all of which are very important to successfully develop a grounded theory and generate and practical hypothesis on the emerging behaviors patterns that affect the implementation and the employment of enterprise social media platform systems.

121 References

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146 Appendix A: Semi-Structure Interview Questions for End-Users

Physicals Participation Mode of Activities (associated with specific applications) -What?  Information producing/consuming (creating, editing, removing, -When? publishing)? -How?  Information processing (browse, search, find, share, exchange)?  Information sense-making (tagging, liking, linking, voting, commenting, de-tagging, de-linking, disliking)? Mode of Access (to social media)  Applications: which applications for which activity?  Frequency of access (when do you feel that you need to access? During working hours or off hours?  Physical access: PC/Non-PC? Which one is more effective? Location (office vs. off-office (where?))  Are they any unique use patterns of social media tools in your global region? Psychologicals Perception Basic Understanding -How? Explain  What is social media? What is it for? (What kind of tools you -What is/are? are using?)  What is innovation? What is collaboration? (Who are you working with?)  What does work/organizational culture mean (to you)?  Where are you in the process? Where is it from?  What is the contribution of (your) particular activities to the innovation process? Influence Factors  Encouraging/discouraging messages (by culture) from the management?  Encouraging/discouraging features (by design) of the tools?  Colleagues and peers: encouraging? Influencing? Network- What & How? effect at all? Evaluation  Impression over usability and usefulness. Could be improved, in which way?  How does your specific role benefit from (or be constrained by) social media tools? Comfort factors  Trust factor: is it as smooth as face-to-face collaboration? What can social media do better? What can face-to-face do better? Driven/Emerging Emerging Behaviors or Driven Behaviors Behavior  Are you using social media tools in your personal life? (For How/When? example, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) If so, how does your personal usage compare to your work-related use?  What behaviors are emerging during users using the tools to engage the collaborative process  Do you think those behaviors are implicated driven by o The tools (by design)? o The influence (by culture, policy, management)? o Intrinsic motivation to contribute to the network

147 Appendix B: Semi-Structure Interview Questions for Designers

Philosophicals Architecture Objective of Building the System in a Big Picture What & How?  Could you summarize the objective of implementing this system?  Does any cultural infrastructure contribute the deployment of the system?  What are important design factors that make the system work and motivate the users to participate the social media?  According to design perspective, what should be the roles of users, executives, and designers?  Did your company’s approach to innovation through cross pollination influence your design specification for the system? Explain Active Translation ( Management Designer User )  How do translate/reflect management’s vision into social media deployment?  In which levels how do you translate? ( strategics? tactics? operationals? ) Please explain, example?  How does the translation affects the tools’ standard and practice? Technicals Functionality Usefulness & Usability What & How?  What are the differences between using social media in a closed network (a small world) and in the internet? Possible participants and actual participants  What kind of usefulness and usability that are affected by the being a “closed” network. (Advantages, disadvantages? Explain  Facebook approach? Security & Privacy  Is there any negative impact toward organizational security & privacy resulting from using social media? (Explain)  Has the system ever encountered security and privacy risks/issues at all? (Explain)  By design, how do you deal with these problems? Human Factor Place & Space What & How & Why?  By design, what are the factors used to make users feel comfortable to participate in the social media space? (Psychological factors? Trust factor?)  Are the social media features in your design that bridge the psychological gap of non co-location communication?  What are emerging behaviors of the users during engaging the social media tools? When? Work and Life  What are the potential costs to the workers using the social media? Costs mean personal life, workload, and employment.  Have the users carried on their jobs to work off-hour? o How the design supports this? o Any negative impact toward personal life or employment? Knowledge Managing on-the-run Knowledge Management  How the design manages to keep track of distributed knowledge over the network?  Any IP ownership/conflict at all? Control Framing the Use of Social Media  Is there any rule/restriction imposed on social media use?  Is there any design effort to drive users to perform desired behaviors? Assessment Cost-Effect  Did you do cost benefit analysis in selecting one tool over another? If so, how?  In choosing off the self software systems, did you do any customization? If so, how?  Could you foresee the trajectory and trend of social media use for collaborative innovation process in the next year, three years, and five years?

148 Appendix C: Semi-Structure Interview Questions for Executives and Managers

Strategics Organizational Structure & Concerns  Since the use of social media tools makes the biggest impact at the pan-organizational level, what is your prime concern ?  How do you get leadership support for the use of social media?  Does social media supports all functions across departments/units in the same way in the same degree? Tactics  When and how did you decide that your company needed social media tools?  When and how did you decide that your company was ready for social media tools?  Do you think you can control it? o If so, how do you control it through which channel ?  Policy, directly imposing on employee  Design, indirectly imposing on access and practice o If not so, how do you circumvent the control ?  By which means ? Operationals  In managerial perspective, what could be potential risks, issues, and foreseeable vulnerabilities resulting from using social media? o Personal use in the work place  Whether it is allowed  The nondisclosure/positing of business-related content  The discussion of the workplace-related topics  Inappropriate sites, content or conversations o Personal use outside the workplace  The nondisclosure/posting of business-related content  Standard disclaimers if identifying the employer  The dangers of posting too much personal information o Business use  the scope of topics or information permitted to flow through this channel  Disallowed activities (installation of applications, playing games, etc.)  How would you mitigate those risks and issues? o Policy and Governance, Assurance? o People: Training? Regular awareness? o Process: Business process and social media policies are aligned? o Technologies: Capability to mitigate risks?

 How could you do communicate with end users and designers that they are on the right pathway of making progress on using Enterprise 2.0?

Visions  How do social media contribute to organization’s social capital and knowledge management ?  Could you talk about your vision about the trajectory and trend of social media use for collaborative innovation process in the next year, three years, and five years? o What would be the central business and managerial philosophy shaping the Enterprise 2.0? o How do you share your vision with your employees (end users and designers)? o How do you translate your vision into digestible, absorbable forms/means so that all the stakeholders are encouraged to implement your vision?

149 Suwan Juntiwasarakij

Education

2012 Doctor of Philosophy The Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA College of Information Sciences and Technology Thesis topic: Harnessing Social Media Collaborative Intelligence to Champion Enterprise Innovation Advisor: Irene Petrick, Ph.D.

2010 Master of Science The Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA College of Information Sciences and Technology Thesis topic: Introducing Contemporary Social Exchange Theory to Understand Knowledge Transfer Issues in High-Tech Outsourcing Services Advisor: Eileen Trauth, Ph.D.

2003 Bachelor of Science Chulalongkorn University Bangkok, Thailand Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, the Faculty of Science and Technology Senior Project: Inventory Management System for King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital Advisor: Pattarasinee Bhattarakosol, Ph.D.

Publications

The Rise of the Rest: Hotbeds of Innovation in Emerging Markets . (2011). Journal of Research Technology Management , 54(4), 14-26. (with I. J. Petrick).

Analyzing ICT and Development: Thailand's Path to the Information Economy . (2011). Journal of Global Information Management , 19(1), 1-29. (with H. Huang, A. Techatassanasoontorn, and E. Trauth).

Toward Collective Business Intelligence and Knowledge Management with Social Media: A Case of Social Software Supporting Fuzzy Front End Activities in Innovation Process . (2011). iSymposium: the IST Graduate Student Symposium . University Park, Pennsylvania, March 25 th , 2011. (With I. J. Petrick).

Understanding Contemporary Knowledge Transfer Issues in High-Tech Work under Cooperative Competitive Environment: Introducing Social Exchange Theory. (2010). iSymposium: the IST Graduate Student Symposium . University Park, Pennsylvania, February 18 th – 19 th , 2010. (With E. Trauth).

Exploring Contemporary Issues in Knowledge Transfer in IT Outsourcing: The Theoretical Perspective . (2009). Americas Conference on Information Systems , San Francisco, California August 6 th -9th , 2009. (with E. Trauth) .

The Impact of IT Outsourcing Practice on Employment Culture: An IT Professional's Perspective . (2008). 2008 ACM SIGMIS CPR Conference, Virginia, USA, April 2008.

ICT and Economic Development: Analyzing Thailand's Path to the Information Economy . (2007). International Decision Sciences Institute Conference , Bangkok, Thailand, July 2007. (with H. Huang, A. Techatassanasoontorn, and E. Trauth).