Understanding the Usage of Enterprise Social Networks in a Global Manufacturing Company

Enterprise social networks are closed social networks with the purpose of increasingcommunication within the company. However, a current estimate is that up to 80% of theimplementations of an enterprise social network fails due to low usage. Previous studies havelisted several important influencing factors that will impact the usage of this platform. Sinceidentifying these factors however, the field has mainly moved away from studying this andbecause of that there are few studies confirming the factors that have been discovered and fewindependent research teams that have worked on this topic.This work aims to observe actual historical usage of an enterprise social network to observe ifthe previously identified influencing factors provide a good indication about its usage. Thework will be able to provide an indication to the scientific community that there are stillunknown parameters relating to the usage of enterprise social networks.The purpose of the thesis is hence to test the existing theories and the research question of thework is: How well can known influencing factors predict the usage of an enterprise socialnetwork in a global manufacturing company?During the work, seven factors were studied. Of these seven, one of the factors could beconfirmed. For three of the factors there were insufficient data to draw any reliableconclusions and for three of the factors no or only a weak correlation between the usage of theenterprise social network and the influencing factor was observed. As such, the knowninfluencing factors do not appear to be able to predict the usage of an enterprise socialnetwork in this setting.Hence, this work indicates that further studies are needed within this area and that theinfluencing factors as listed today are inadequate in predicting the usage of an enterprisesocial network. The answer to the research question is thus that the quality of any predicationmade of these influencing factors appears to be weak at best and the scientific contribution ofthe work is to encourage more studies within the field