Here is the second part of a serie of blogposts where I present the research and findings of my Social Media & Business thesis. Again I hope you comment and share your views. In the end I will make a pdf available and we might even have updated sections based on the comments!
Internal enterprise use of social media.
The social aspects of social media that allow the collecting and sharing of collective intelligence among the social media platforms users can be used by organizations to internally collect, retain and share information. The web 2.0 structure and technologies can also be used for easier communication and collaboration in organizations.
Brzozowski et al. (2009) write about the internal use of social media at Hewlett-Packard (HP). Social media provides a free broadcast platform that allows authors to circumvent traditional organizational hierarchies and reach organizationally distant readers. Unlike email that is targeted to specific recipients.
HP offers all employees a variety of social media services used for internal collaboration and communication. Internal blogs for example can facilitate internal collaboration and knowledge sharing and aim at the benefits of lightweight informal collaboration among employees.
To reap the benefits of internal social media usage managers should be stimulated to ‘leed by example’. For venues that imply discussion (e.g. blogs, comments, forums) external validation from managers is more important to the users than in venues of archives (e.g. links, wikis). Culture and organization structure also influence the internal support to use social media.
Analyzing the building blocks of web 2.0 and social media
Organization theory also indicates the importance of technologies and their consequences on organizations. Dhar & Sundararajan (2007) argue that the past forty years certain principles in IT can be recognized that remain constant. These invariants can be used to interpret the past and make predictions about information technologies in the future. They present a model where in the influence of these technological invariants and the consequences on IT in Business are explained. These invariants will be used to analyze web 2.0. The consequences on IT that are found seem to be in line with the technological trends we see in web 2.0.
Technological invariants
The first technological invariant is digital representation, the visualization of things as information and in particular digitally represented information. Examples are: a bank balance, music, our voice or video can all represented as digital information. This digitalization allows for new possibilities in the use and transport of information.
The second invariant is computing power. This is: “the long-term exponential growth of hardware power, broadband, storage and the miniaturization of IT devices”. Moore’s law, which states that the processing power doubles each six months, can explain this growth in computing power and has proven to be accurate. Computing power has grown, become cheaper and software has made it more reliable.
The last invariant is modularity, this is the sustained increase in programmability of IT systems in a modular way. This allows aggregated complexity to be easier integrated into existing standardized software platforms. This allows existing IT systems to add new functionality and usability with just modular additions to the software. This way Modularity fundamentally provides power to the first two invariants by making these possible and easier to achieve.
Digital representation is the technological invariant that has enabled many of the web 2.0 services to exist and grow with further digital representation of information. Blogs and wikis contain text, pictures, sounds and videos and increasingly more data and information that is made possible by digital representation of this information (Dhar & Sundararajan, 2007).
Computing power has increased and become cheaper (Dhar & Sundararajan, 2007) making internet publishing on blogs, wikis and other services fast, reliable and cheap. Barriers that might have existed in broadband for the streaming of video for example have been overcome by this continuously increase in computing power over the past 40 years.
Modularity drives the flexibility of web 2.0 allowing new functionalities and usability to be added to existing systems. Existing technologies on web 2.0 platforms are often updated enabling new functionalities. Gmail labs from Google and new functionalities in video’s on Youtube are examples of this. Widgets on blog services and widgets/apps on mobile phones also enable publishers to aggregate complexity trough modularity and offer users new functionality and usability trough updates and releases of widgets.
These three invariants are clearly identifiable in web 2.0 and contribute to the three consequences in the model.
Consequences in business
These three technological invariants form the building blocks to recognize the consequences of IT developments in business. Dhar & Sundararajan (2007) recognize three business consequences of these invariants. Digital representation together with the growth of computing power and communication power facilitate the separation of information from a growing number of artifacts. An example is the music CD, where the digital distribution of mp3′s only became feasible once there were internet connections fast enough to transfer the data.
This separation of information from its artifacts can alter the fundamental economics of an industry, making their products become information goods. The economics and production of information goods differ from tangible goods and will have many consequences for the way business operates once this separation starts to plays a role in the company’s sector. The music industry is one of the greatest examples of this and had to change traditional business models to still make profit in the digital music age.
The second consequence is the growth in computing hardware power and the ability of software to be layered in a modular way. This allows for IT infrastructures to become larger, more powerful and more accessible. Supply chain management software platforms and on-demand search platforms like Google are an example of this. Modularity results in functionality adopted by early innovators to be incrementally integrated into these powerful and shared infrastructure platforms.
The third consequence is a growth in society of the importance and variety of IT mediated spaces of interaction. The difference between Technology-mediated spaces and spaces in the physical world is that technology mediated spaces are shaped continuously by the participants, where as real-life spaces are developed and launched in less continuous form. Digital representation is key in facilitating exchanges of information in these spaces. Computing power supports this by allowing the built of complex Technology-mediated interfaces and Software modularity enables the evolvement of spaces and build of new ones with little effort.
The first consequence ‘information separates form its artifacts’ in some industries has led to products to become information goods. In combination with electronic networks this has enabled and hasten the transformation of physical products to service products (Rust & Kannan, 2003), fundamentally changing economics and production of businesses in industries that are affected. In the music industry this has had great consequences. On the internet we see iTunes and Hulu as a response from the music and film industry to adapt to these changes and create new business models.
The second consequence, shared IT platforms of growing functionality, where IT infrastructures become larger, more powerful and more accessible. An on-demand search platform like Google is an example of this. These large accessible IT platforms can create opportunities and threats for companies which need to be addressed in corporate strategy.
The third consequence, the growth in importance of technology-mediated spaces and interfaces. Digital representation enables exchanges of information in these spaces and is what happens on blogs, wiki’s and other web 2.0 services. These exchanges are mediated in services and spaces that are found on IT and web 2.0 platforms. This is resembles what we see in social media spaces where: “collective goods are produced through computer-mediated collective action”(Smith et al. 2008). And these exchanges arise on web 2.0 services and platforms.
I argue that the third consequence is largely connected to the second consequence on the web. The technology-mediated spaces can be found in the social media part of web 2.0 that operates on large shared IT platforms.
Conclusion
The technological invariants and consequences of IT in business can be used to analyze the building blocks of web 2.0 technologies and the consequences of web 2.0 on IT in organizations. Web 2.0 is greatly driven by modularity and result in the creation of large IT platforms and computer-mediated spaces. Analyzing these IT developments in business has show that web 2.0 technologies are important for organizations.
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3 Comments
#1323 : December 29, 2009
Good observation………but we have to uncover lot more ideas to get advantages from social networking and web 2.0
#1324 : December 29, 2009
Good summary, but what are the implications? How do businesses get the most out of social media?
#1328 : January 3, 2010
Now that we've looked at the fundamentals next up is how through alignment businesses can get the most out of social media. Of course this only gives an answer to a theoretical approach. Creative idea's are needed to make social media work for your, specially when you want to use it as a marketing communication tool.