Distributed Collaboration in Organizations and Networks
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ItemIdentifying Bridge Users: the Knowledge Transfer Agents in Enterprise Collaboration Systems( 2020-01-07)In recent years enterprise collaboration systems (ECS) integrated with social network capabilities have become popular tools for supporting knowledge management (KM) strategies and organizational learning. Increased usage has resulted in higher interest in understanding and classifying the roles that ECS users adopt online. Previous research has investigated user role identification by considering: the degree of participation in an ECS, the user interactions with shared content, the user role in the ECS network, and the user KM-role observed within an interaction. Although all of these factors provide insights into ECS user engagement, they fail to fully consider the knowledge sharing perspective. In this paper, we define "bridge users" within the context of KM and present a framework for identifying them using semantic analysis of user-generated content. Further, we present results and observations from tests of our pipeline on the ECS of a large multinational engineering company with more than 100k users.
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ItemIdentifying Knowledge Brokers in Enterprise Social Media( 2020-01-07)Knowledge brokers act as a bridge between people and issues; they facilitate knowledge creation and sharing, and connect communities of practice. The extant literature has focused mostly on roles and network positions of knowledge brokers. This paper adds communicative actions to identifying these important actors. In the present study we develop and propose a method to identify knowledge brokering communication in an enterprise social media (ESM) platform. We posit that active knowledge brokers can be identified based on their generic social media communication. We use a large data set containing 124,015 messages among employees, and their network positions by social network analysis to identify knowledge brokers, and further analyze a sample of the communication content qualitatively. We argue that better understanding of the identification of knowledge brokering communication in a collaboration network can benefit employee assignments and help develop communication practices in ESM, leading to improved knowledge sharing and creation.
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ItemA Social Network Perspective on the Success of Open Source Software: The Case of R Packages( 2020-01-07)In this paper, we seek to identify the factors that influence the impact of open source software (OSS) on users community through the analysis of the evolution of the OSS network. Based on longitudinal data collected from the comprehensive R archive network (CRAN), we empirically examine how the network of R packages evolves over time and exert its influence on the scientific community. We find that critical network features derived from CRAN, such as page-rank, closeness, and betweenness centralities, play a significant role in determining the impact of each package on the research and publication activities in the scientific community. Furthermore, the performance of R packages can be explained as a flow of information from the core to the periphery that exhibits strong spillover effects.
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ItemAnalysis of Task Management in Virtual Academic Teams( 2020-01-07)Social Collaboration Analytics (SCA) aims at measuring collaboration in Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS). In this paper, we apply SCA to investigate the use of Task Management (TM) features in virtual academic teams on a collaboration platform. This paper contributes to theory by developing the TM Catalog describing the elements and characteristics of TM. Our literature review identified only three studies analyzing the use of TM features in ECS. These studies base their analyses on transactional data (event logs). We propose to analyze both the structure and characteristics of tasks, as well as how tasks are used. In our paper, we show how SCA can be applied to gain insights on the use of TM features. Based on data from an academic collaboration platform, we demonstrate the characteristics of tasks and how different types of virtual academic teams make use of TM features.
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ItemShared Workspaces of the Digital Workplace: From Design for Coordination to Coordination for Flexible Design( 2020-01-07)The emergence of new digital platforms and social software at work changes workplaces and how people coordinate their work. To date, coordination has only been minimally studied in the context of the social software enabled digital workplace. Through a qualitative analysis, we identify different coordination mechanisms (CM) in various practice areas as envisioned and used with the same collaboration platform by three healthcare workplace teams. The findings illustrate the flexibility of shared workspace designs of the digital workplace where CM cannot be anticipated a priori by researchers and software developers. We end with a discussion of the findings from a sociomaterial perspective to encourage studies that monitor the flexible and complex enactment of temporally emerging shared workspace designs.
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ItemThe Proximity Paradox: How Distributed Work Affects Relationships and Control( 2020-01-07)Interview data is used to examine how managers enact organizational control when separated from their direct reports by geographic distance. Findings suggest that a need for additional context drives managers to cultivate deeper relationships with their staff, creating an unexpected outcome: working at a distance means managers feel closer to their staff. A theoretical framework demonstrating how context and relationships are related to organizational control is presented and implications for distributed work and organizational control research are discussed.
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