Michael Zeiller

Adoption, motivation and success factors of social media for team collaboration in SMEs

In team collaboration we deal with collaboration among team members that may either belong to the same enterprise (intra-enterprise collaboration) or among team members belonging to different companies (e.g., in research projects). Social media provide an efficient and accessible means of encouraging and supporting team members working together on shared objects, i.e., performing collaborative tasks within these teams. Due to ease of use and access, especially small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) may profit a lot from social media in team collaboration. Based on a number of case studies on the application of social media in SMEs, we analyze the adoption and implementation, the motivation of team members and their benefit, and success factors of the utilization of social media for team collaboration. To provide a set of case studies that allow for detailed comparison and in-depth analysis of multiple case studies, a standardized case study structure is introduced.

Open Source Tools for Enterprise 2.0: A Feature-Based Adaptable Analysis

When introducing Enterprise 2.0 tools to support knowledge workers working together on cognitive tasks and sharing information, companies and organizations face the problem of choosing the right tools from a huge market of systems. In particular for SMEs, open source tools for Enterprise 2.0 offer a good alternative to commercial systems, but the diversity of systems makes this marketplace quite confusing. Therefore we present a study of the growing market for Enterprise 2.0 systems that focuses entirely on systems available under an open source license. We use a set of 97 individual features and criteria that are grouped around the central functionalities of communication, coordination, collaboration and connection, to analyze the suitability of a representative sample of open source Enterprise 2.0 tools for the average knowledge worker. The evaluation matrix can be easily adapted to get more specific evaluation results for more particular company requirements. Our results show that there are many technically mature solutions with a broad range of functionality available from the market of open source tools for Enterprise 2.0.