Our enterprise microblogging cases study “Towards an understanding of social software: the case of Arinia” has been accepted for HICSS. HICSS is a leading Information Systems conference taking place in Koloa (Hawaii).

Here is the  abstract:

“This paper presents the case of Arinia, a custom made piece of social software with strong similarities to today’s microblogging applications. Arinia has been in use in a medium-sized technology company for more than 10 years; therefore, it is considered that the software is a valuable source of insights into the underlying principles of microblogging in an enterprise context. Due to the unique nature of the case we used an interpretive approach to learn about Arinia, its users and their contexts, involving semi-structured interviews, a survey, quantitative usage data and an excerpt from the posting base in order to achieve a comprehensive view on the case. The results suggest that there is reasonable potential in sharing micro-level information inside organizations. In particular, the findings provide evidence of enabling factors and allow us to introduce the concept of the ‘information food chain’. Together, these findings present a foundation for further research on current microblogging applications.”

The citation will be as follows:

Barnes, Stuart J.; Böhringer, Martin; Kurze, Christian; Stietzel, Jacqueline: Towards an understanding of social software: the case of Arinia, in: Proceedings of the 43nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-43), Koloa, Kauai, Hawaii, 05.-08. Januar 2010, in press.

I just came by an interesting piece of my master thesis which I should share with you. I wanted to identify important use cases for microblogging but discovered that there is a really broad spectrum of different scenarios. Therefore, I tried to order these thoughts towards the different viewpoints of ‘microblogging stakeholders’. If you look at your employees such things like company culture, motivation or social awareness could be important, while your process manager most probably is thrilled because of the documenting and tracking possibilities. This resulted in the following usage pyramid.

I chose the form of a pyramid as the basic levels seem to provide a very good argumentation for microblogging in terms of hard facts and ROI, while the benefits on the top are more ‘soft’ and hard to quantify. However, they are useful and in my view the full spectrum is exactly what makes microblogging so powerful.