Knowledge Management Goals Revisited – A Cross-Sectional Analysis of Social Software Adoption in Corporate Environments

When it comes to tools serving as knowledge management instruments, social software has gained increasing importance. Whereas corporate social software is almost unanimously recognised to have enabled a fundamental shift in the ways of interacting and communicating within a company, the implementation approaches taken vary a lot from company to company and have not yet been examined in detail. This is also true for the goals set when introducing such tools, as well as for the implementation strategy as a whole. Against this background, we have studied and analysed social software adoption in 23 companies and derived six main goals of corporate social software adoption. These were consequently compared with the goals of knowledge management projects and initiatives, as identified in a series of well-known knowledge management studies. While some of the goals set for the introduction of corporate social software seem to coincide with those resulting from knowledge management studies, some others appear to be new and specific for corporate social software.