Enterprise social networking : monitoring driving forces, trends and weak signals - the implications for the futures working environment

Abstract

The emergence of Web 2.0 technologies has empowered employees by facilitating the user-generated and user-centered content into work culture. This has lead to fundamental changes in people’s ability to share their ideas and views in a global working culture.

This thesis combines Future Studies, Foresight, and Marketing. The scope of this research is multidisciplinary. The research is divided into three sections. The first chapter aims to explain the theory and main attributes of social media phenomena. The second part of this study describes the process and theories a weak signal has to pass in the enterprise strategy-innovation process. An application called the TrendWiki acts as an example and a case study. Thirdly, the research attempts to monitor and identify weak signals, trends knowledge, tacit knowledge and challenges with a method environmental scanning. Goal is to determine which are the major factors and driving forces that will change the future of organization culture and how those factors are likely to change over the next 1-15 years? To study what are the needs for current and future social spaces in the working environments? The goal is to understand the behavioral changes between generations. The material was gathered with Delphi interviews arranged during spring 2009.

Collected material forms an analysis and consumer focused trend briefing, which contains today's main themes and topical trends around enterprise social web. The main themes are “New Ways of Working”, “Human & Tech Integration” and “Digital Creativity & Entrepreneurship”. Collected trends and signals are classified by social, technological, economical, environmental and political factors. The outcome of this research will be presented in the TrendWiki -environment in the beginning of year 2010.