Evolving Social Media into Productivity Platforms

Social media have become a global phenomenon affecting people in their private lives and in their personal interactions, particularly among younger people. It is thus not surprising that social media are also being explored in professional contexts such as in large enterprises, where a number of social media platforms and social extensions to existing workgroup and collaboration systems have been emerging. In this paper, we consider one such platform that was developed for the internal use in a large global enterprise. We present data and their analysis for how this social media platform has been used in HP over the past five years. We then present conclusions from this analysis and relate them to work patterns in enterprises with the goal to better adapt social media platforms to the enterprise domain such that they better integrate with the work context people have as well as with IT systems that are used by them. The contribution of the paper is two-fold. First, we present data and usage analysis of our social media platform over the past five years. Second, based on this analysis, we derive enhancements for social media platforms to better fit the work context and that can turn social media into a new generation of productivity platforms for the enterprise.