What Benefits do they Bring? A Case Study Analysis on Enterprise Social Networks

Over the last years, Enterprise Social Networks (ESN) have gained increasing attention both in academia and practice, resulting in a large number of publications dealing with ESN. Among them is a large number of case studies describing the benefits of ESN in each individual case. Based on the different research objects they focus, various benefits are described. However, an overview of the benefits achieved by using ESN is missing and will, thus, be elaborated in this article (research question 1). Further, we cluster the identified benefits to more generic categories and finally classify them to the capabilities of traditional IT as presented by Davenport and Short (1990) to determine if new capabilities of IT arise using ESN (research question 2). To address our research questions, we perform a qualitative content analysis on 37 ESN case studies. As a result, we identify 99 individual benefits, classify them to the capabilities of traditional IT, and define a new IT capability named Social Capital. Our results can, e.g., be used to align and expand current ESN success measurement approaches.