Enterprise mobility and social media analytics as leverage for corporate knowledge management

Research has shown that Knowledge Management (KM), as a field of practice and study, gained momentum from the rise of the World Wide Web (Web) in the 1990s. With the extant growth of the Web into a full scale social space and the emergence of Social Media (SM) platforms like Twitter, the hierarchical boundaries within the organisation are broken down and a lateral flow of information is created. As socio-technical platforms, social media are regarded as social machines that are co-constituted by humans and technology to facilitate the social processes of knowledge sharing. These processes are enabled by the ordinary social interaction and communication flow that exists within a corporate organisation. In recent years, these social interactions have been phenomenally facilitated by the increased use of social media (SM) as well as the consumerisation and adoption of mobile devices within the workplace. Apart from the exponential increase in the amount of potentially insightful data being generated, this trend has created some tension between KM and SM in which SM is perceived as a new trend that threatens the sustainability of KM as a viable field of practice. There is a division between scholars who question the value of KM within the current socio-technical trends, given that KM has previously suffered an image problem in the past, and those who argue for these new socio-technical trends as an extension of knowledge management. To address this dilemma, this work presents EMSoD | A Framework for repositioning KM within the current socio-technical trends of Enterprise Mobility and Social (media) Data. The framework highlights the cyclical interaction between the process of tacit to explicit knowledge conversion, knowledge discovery from either - or a combination of - public social media data and data from corporate social media within a managed platform. At the core of this framework is KM value to organisations, for which a measurement mechanism is also devised in this thesis. Also presented in this thesis is a granular study of the impact of enterprise mobility on employee engagement as a function of their usage satisfaction from mobile devices and social applications