Students are required to analyse the weekly lecture material of weeks 1 to 11 and create concise content analysis summaries of the theoretical concepts contained in the course lecture slides. Where...

Enterprise social netwroking
Contents
Introduction    1
Background    2
Discussion    3
Benefits    3
Risks    5
Conclusion    5
References    6
Introduction
Enterprise Social Networking is a platform used by organizations to establish communications within themselves as well as externally. This communication includes project management, team communication, collaboration tools, etc. It can be defined as a platform that enables the people at the same workplace to post files and text linked to others or themselves, see the connections, messages, texts or files posted or edited by others over the network within the organization, communicate or
oadcast messages among the co-workers and precisely or implicitly indicate certain workers as communication partners. Enterprise Social Networks accomplish these four activities within the organization to make the work environment interactive and secure.
Workplace collaborations use Enterprise Social Networks (ESNs) more commonly replacing the traditional intranets. The intranets use centralized hub with limited business application, while ESNs and lack variety of features like direct messaging channels, threads, comments, announcements and news within organization, status updates, etc. ESNs offer platform similar to Twitter or Facebook but limited within the organization connecting people only within the workforce.
In context of organizations, social media is employed for internal communication and social interaction within them. These ESNs contain several functions similar to external social networking platforms like Facebook and they imitate the features to a large extent too. However, features like document tagging, posts and blogs are also included. Therefore, the tools like microblogging, social networking and tagging are all integrated within enterprise social media platform. Enterprise social media over ESNs makes the communicative activities visible within the workplace as those four mentioned in the beginning like communicative messages between two co-workers, their communication network and their output which could not be visible otherwise. It may be difficult to track intricately every communication but it becomes known through the ESN that the two workers communicated. Subsequently, ESNs facilitate expanding the range of people and texts from which others on the network can learn thus offering better opportunities for social learning.
ESNs promote worker collaboration and knowledge by sharing across silos. It is an effective tool for increasing communication and collaboration. For instance, work of individuals may remain invisible to workers from different work domain or knowledge domain within the enterprise. This is where ESN plays an important role in connecting enterprise wide people. When those individuals communicate over ESN, their communication persists for other to ponder even after they log out. The records of communication remain visible for longer duration and the ability to see those communications renders others on the network a chance to learn from experts and what has proved to be successful previously. ESNs capacitates the messages, networks, text and files to persist and be visible to everyone in the organization in their original form. This enables those who are not involved in the original conversation can learn from it and contribute. The workers can learn metaknowledge and instrumental knowledge from visibility and persistence of information over ESN. The former knowledge is that about whom and what the people in the organization know and the later is the knowledge of how to execute something.
Background
Enterprise Social Networks came into existence in the later 20th century with sites like Yammer, Jive, Chatter, etc. They acted as social media platform within organizations to communicate with teams, or track someone’s content and actions over the network. Typically, the organizations use one of the three paths to enable enterprise knowledge sharing. Firstly, through sites tat are publicly available. Second, proprietary solutions developed within the organization offered later for sale and third, privately implementing open source software. The first path is taken by the workers when they independently join public social media platform. This path was used when internal social media platforms did not exist. But they led to issues like information leakage, work boundary and hierarchy problems when employees at different levels became friends. The proprietary solutions are developed on the other hand by IT companies to benefit their knowledge workers with increased productivity as well as enhance the potential of their product. The prototypes like Beehive system developed in such context are used for further research and support customer requirements. Such systems support large number of users to share content with distant connections with ease thus enhancing the overall productivity of the users. However, such prototypes had small lifespan as their features may be incorporated into internal social network. The third alternative of implementing an in-house platform for social interaction within the organization helps overcome security issues as it remains accessible to internal audiences only. Certain organizations facilitate the solutions to be implemented on the customer organization’s servers or host them over cloud. These solutions offer...