Public defence in International Business, M.Sc (Econ. & Bus.Adm.) Mia Leppälä

Title of thesis: Enterprise Social Media for Knowledge Brokering

Doctoral student: Mia Leppälä

Opponent: Professor Paavo Ritala, LUT University

Custos (Chairperson): Assistant Professor Niina Nurmi, Aalto University School of Science

Enterprise Social Media for Knowledge Brokering

Advances in communication and collaboration technologies have changed the ways in which knowledge is shared and created. The COVID-19 pandemic further accelerated the shift to digital work by increasing remote work, and communication channels such as Slack, MS Teams Chat, and Google Chat (formerly Hangouts) have opened up internal communication across organizational units, breaking down barriers related to geography and time zones, thereby enabling seamless collaboration around the world. In this study, these communication channels are referred to as enterprise social media (ESM), which denotes communication channels where messages are short and visible to a large audience within the organization. The messages form discussion threads that can be edited and revisited as needed. While these communication channels facilitate the flow of messages, they also present challenges. Excessive information makes it difficult to find relevant knowledge, and open communication for everyone has been observed to influence privacy and even cause information overload. To address these challenges, this doctoral thesis focuses on knowledge brokering, which bridges gaps between organizational departments and strives to ensure that essential knowledge reaches those who need it. By combining qualitative analysis with computational techniques such as social network analysis and topic modeling, this research identifies knowledge brokers within enterprise social media and demonstrates how these channels reveal how topics of importance to employees capture attention across the organization. Knowledge brokers are skilled at sharing essential information, connecting experts from different fields, and making complex knowledge understandable. They can leverage enterprise social media to connect people, share knowledge, and create new applications for existing knowledge. In doing so, they may potentially mitigate the problems caused by information overload.

Keywords: knowledge brokering, enterprise social media, affordances, attention

Thesis available for public display 10 days prior to the defence at: https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/doc_public/eonly/riiputus/

Contact information:
[email protected]

+358 400 667 150

Doctoral theses in the School of Business: https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/handle/123456789/50