Are business users social? A design experiment exploring information sharing in enterprise social systems

In recent years, social technology has changed the ways people collaborate and communicate. With the blurring boundaries between work and personal life, business software vendors have begun to deliberate on the possibilities for enhancing the rather rigid and impersonal structures in enterprise systems (ES) by integrating social features. In doing so, they frequently assume that business users share the same interaction patterns as private users. In this paper, we challenge this belief and explore the factors that stimulate business users to share information in ES environments. By means of a design experiment, we show different use scenarios and explore business users’ attitudes toward open and unconditional information sharing in ES. Our results demonstrate that business users are less ‘social’ and that applying social features in ES is highly context dependent. Based on these findings, we offer recommendations for software vendors and researchers who are interested in the social enhancements of ES. Journal of Information Technology advance online publication, 24 November 2015; doi:10.1057/jit.2015.28