Bobcatsss, January 2015

Julia Meijvogel

Let’s talk business on the value of Enterprise Social Media

Air France- KLM

Passenger Business Cargo Engineering & Maintenance

Commercial, Sales & Marketing division

11.000 employees

HQ Amstelveen (NL)- Paris

Departments: Areas:

• Pricing & Revenue management Europe & North Africa

• Digital Africa

• Information Management Organization Asia & Pacific

• Marketing CILA (Caribbean, Indian Ocean & Latin America)

• Direct Sales & Services (DSS) MEGI (Middle East, Gulf and Indian subcontinent)

• Global Sales & Sales Support

Ambition and goals Commercial, Sales & Marketing

“unlock collective knowledge and content at AFKL Commercial Marketing & Sales

to create an efficient, powerful and involved workforce” (ishare, 2014).

• Transparency

• Greater interactions

• Shorter communications lines

• Fewer communication channels

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIqA_YKeboc

Definition Enterprise Social Media

Web-based platforms that allow workers to (1) communicate messages with

specific coworkers or broadcast messages to everyone in the organization; (2)

explicitly indicate or implicitly reveal particular coworkers as communication

partners; (3) post, edit, and sort text and files linked to themselves or others; and

(4) view the messages, connections, text, and files communicated, posted, edited

and sorted by anyone else in the organization at any time of their choosing (p.2)

(Leonardi, Huysman & Steinfield, 2013).

Affordances & Constraints

“…unique to the particular ways in which an actor, or a set of actors, perceives

and uses the object” [p.5] (Leonardi, 2012)

The affordances approach focuses on the material features of technology, which

allow people to do things, which they were not able to do before, or which were

difficult to do before without the particular technology (Treem & Leonardi, 2012).

ishare

ishare

Research question and methods

How do different work practices of knowledge workers and the use of Enterprise

Social Media interact with each other from an affordances perspective?

Literature relatively new

20 in-depth interviews (60 minutes)

10 in The Netherlands, 10 conference calls

Different work practices

Coding answers

Results: Openness of communication

• Transparency

• Efficiency

• Timeliness of information

• Find expertise

Constraints of open communication

2

• Information subject to change

• Leaking sensitive information

• Interjection by others

Constraints of closed communication

• Search through information

• To do your job

Propositions

1. It is important to highlight the affordances gained by openness of ESM tools,

as this is one of the strengths of such a platform for organizations and certain

work practices of knowledge workers.

2. ESM platforms are not appropriate for all different kinds of work practices.

3. The success of ESM platforms is dependent on the interaction between

different work practices and the perceived affordances and constraints of ESM

technologies.

Let’s talk business

Literature

Fulk, J., & Yuan, Y. C. (2013). Location, Motivation, and Social Capitalization via Enterprise

Social Networking. Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication, 19(1), 20-37.

Leonardi, P. M. (2011). When flexible routines meet flexible technologies: Affordance,

constraint, and the imbrication of human and material agencies. MIS Quarterly, 35(1), 147–167.

Leonardi, P. M., Huysman, M., & Steinfield, C. (2013). Enterprise Social Media: Definition,

History, and Prospects for the Study of Social Technologies in Organizations. Journal of

Computer-Mediated Communication, 19.(1), 1-19

Orlikowski, W. J. (1992). The duality of technology: Rethinking the concept of technology in

organizations. Organization Science, 3(3), 398–427.

Schultze, U., & Boland Jr, R. J. (2000). Knowledge management technology and the

reproduction of knowledge work practices. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 9(2),

193-212.

Treem. J. W., & Leonardi, P. M. (2012). Social Media Use in Organizations: Exploring the

Affordances of Visibility, Editability, Persistence, and Association. Communication Yearbook,

36, 143-189.

Vaast, E., & Kaganer, E. (2013). Social media affordances and governance in the workplace:

An examination of organizational policies. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication,

19(1), 78-101.