A Survey on the Status Quo of Social Collaboration Analytics in Practice

This paper aims to identify and document the status quo and the perceived barriers of Social Collaboration Analytics in practice. The study is part of a publicly funded longitudinal research project on Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS) involving 29 early-adopter user companies. Our paper draws on and extends findings from previous research. The key themes identified from a structured literature review and the documented findings from previous workshops with practitioners were used to develop an online questionnaire. Longitudinal case studies on the same companies helped to inform and interpret the findings. The survey shows that most of the participants have implemented some form of Collaboration Analytics, however, the outputs are mostly on a high abstraction level and the methods quite simplistic. Complex analyses that could help in assessing the degree of cooperation, structures or dynamics in the use of ECS are not (yet) applied. We identified three important reasons for this situation: (1) The analytics tools provided by standard collaboration software do not provide sufficient functionality, (2) there is a lack of awareness and knowledge about more complex forms of analyses and (3) some concepts from the academic literature are not perceived as relevant by practitioners. The survey also confirmed that there are financial, regulatory, data and HR barriers for Social Collaboration Analytics