Enterprise Social Networks: A Successful Implementation within a Telecommunication Company

Although enterprise social network (ESN) has been implemented within a number of organizations to facilitate communication, collaboration and engagement among employees, many organizations are struggling to realize the benefits of this emergent workplace social platform (due to employee underutilization). This paper aims to elucidate a successful ESN use case among employees within a leading Australian telecommunication company. The findings indicate that the employees’ ESN behavior is gravitated by utilitarian and hedonic values, and driven by socio-technical factors. The factors are generically categorized as technological (i.e. platform and content quality), organizational (e.g. community management and top management involvement), social (e.g. critical mass, and constructive communication climate), individual (e.g. knowledge self-efficacy) and task factors (i.e. equivocal tasks and integration to business processes). We suggest that a successful implementation of ESN within an organization involves the nexus between these five factors and recommendations are also made about how ESN usage can be enhanced.