Research paper

Running head: DISSERTATION PROSPECTUS 1

Dissertation Prospectus – Enterprise Social Media and

Joint Military Staff Officer Collaboration

Donald S. Walker

Colorado Technical University

9/5/2016

DISSERTATION PROSPECTUS 2

Introduction to the Problem

Highly collaborative organizations have long benefitted from computer aided

communication. Individual members benefit from increased productivity and access to

information, while the organization benefits from the ability to store and effectively managing

increasing amounts of business data (Turban, Volonino, Wood, & Sipior, 2013). As information

systems and reliance on them have grown, first generation collaborative tools like electronic mail

(email) and networked file shares, or shared drives, proved to be difficult to manage from a

corporate knowledge or knowledge management standpoint (Treem & Leonardi, 2012).

Email accounts present a particular management problem in several ways. First, email

accounts are normally personally assigned to individual employees. When that person leaves,

many organizations have no established method for making that particular employee’s messages

and their inherent corporate knowledge public. The accumulated knowledge simply vanishes

when the account is deleted. Also, email conversations are often fragmented as portions are

forwarded, some recipients “reply all” while others reply individually, and attached documents

are edited without regard to version control. Finally, email conversations have been likened to

hushed conversations held in confidence between employees (Paul M Leonardi, 2014). These

private conversations do little to contribute to the collective consciousness of an organization

(Pees, Glenda Hostetter, & Ziegenfuss, 2009).

Another first generation tool often used in tandem with email is the shared drive. Shared

drives are public, unstructured file storage areas that can be accessed by multiple employees,

depending on assigned permissions. When first introduced, they were a boon to collaborating

workers on then nascent corporate networks. However, the lack of advanced lifecycle

management features like version control and metadata collection soon proved that a corporate

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shared drive could become suboptimal for collaboration and expensive with regard to storage

cost and time lost searching through increasingly larger volumes of unstructured files (Naimoli

& Fari, 2008).

The above limitations of email and shared drives and the problems they pose for

collaborative organizations are exacerbated within military staffs. Joint military staffs, those

where officers of the separate armed services work together on operational issues, are

particularly vulnerable to the loss of corporate knowledge. According to the 2012 edition of the

Joint Officer’s Handbook, these officers “…must be able to effectively find and condense masses

of information into manageable packages for review by and decisions from senior leaders”

(JETD, 2012). Finding and condensing information is extremely difficult when it is buried

within massive, unstructured shared drives or lost entirely in previous officers’ deleted email

accounts.

Study Significance

Studying Enterprise Social Media (ESM) (Paul M. Leonardi, Huysman, & Steinfield,

2013) as viewed through the lens of Organizational Consciousness (Pees et al., 2009) is relevant

and significant for several reasons, particularly within the Joint and Combatant Command staffs

of the US military. ESM is but the latest in computer aided communication (Turban, Bolloju, &

Liang, 2011). While virtually all medium and large companies as well as government agencies

have embraced social media for external, public communication, the tools and techniques

available are showing great promise, but sluggish adoption internally to the enterprise (Gerstner,

2015). The limitations of email and network shared drives for collaboration are well

documented (Mark, Voida, & Cardello, 2012). Conversely, how ESM is being used, what it’s

potential benefits are, and the limits of its usefulness is less prevalent in the scholarly literature.

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Adding new data to the body of knowledge on ESM would be worthwhile and fairly easy

to do, since it’s such a nascent technology. Revolutionizing the study of it might be a stretch in a

dissertation, but I think the Organizational Consciousness theory forms a solid baseline. Military

staffs are, by design, thinking machines. They exist to bring many educated, experienced

officers together to collaborate on solving problems of national security. Studies show that

organizations benefit from transparency in communications (Paul M. Leonardi, 2015). If each

officer were more conscious of the activities and discussions of his or her fellow staff members,

the vital life and death missions of these organizations could be enhanced.

This study could result in changes in actual practice someday if I can effectively describe

the benefits of ESM in a military staff setting. The tools, namely Microsoft SharePoint, are

implemented at all or nearly all joint military organizations owing to a longstanding enterprise-

wide licensing arrangement. My research may provide some measure of motivation to give the

tools more attention in the planning and conduct of their business processes.

Collaboration policy, with regard to specific tools that must be used, is non-existent in the

Department of Defense. Organizations are left to decide for themselves what tools to use, and

security is given first priority over all other factors like effectiveness and records management

procedures. A study aimed specifically at the population of officers working in joint positions

might contribute to the development of policy encouraging the use of ESM.

Theoretical Framework

This study will be informed by the theoretical concept of Organizational Consciousness

(Pees et al., 2009). This theory is based on previous studies of human consciousness, and

extrapolates that previous research and understanding of consciousness to the organizational

level. Pees et al explain organizational consciousness as occurring at 3 stages: reflexive, social,

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and collective consciousness. Reflexive consciousness deals with the abstract notion of an

organization’s sense of self, what makes it unique, and its “values, purpose, quality, and

competencies.” (Pees et al., 2009). Social consciousness deals with the organization’s external

interactions, and how those interactions are manifested. Most closely applicable to this study,

collective consciousness describes how the various members of an organization share thoughts,

views and artifacts that contribute to the body of organizational, or corporate knowledge.

This theoretical framework provides a useful lens through which to view ESM

capabilities and how those capabilities contribute to organizational consciousness, particularly its

collective consciousness. Traditional web technologies are capable of documenting an

organization’s values, purpose, quality and competencies for all members to see, so the nature of

ESM’s user generated content doesn’t pertain as much to reflexive consciousness (Walker,

2014). Also, social consciousness requires open collaboration and transparency outside the

organization, something that is counter to many imperatives like privacy, proprietary knowledge

security, and liability (Turban et al., 2011). ESM used in intra-organizational collaboration is

beyond the scope of this study. Collective consciousness, what the organization’s members

think and know as a group, could be greatly enhanced due to communication visibility (Paul M

Leonardi, 2014). Bringing work-related conversations out of individual email accounts and into

a more transparent medium like ESM should contribute to collective consciousness, illuminating

“who knows who, and who knows what.” (Paul M. Leonardi, 2015).

Purpose Statement

How do ESM tools affect the ability of new team members to quickly integrate and

become productive? If ESM isn’t implemented, what is the perceived value if it were? If the

perceived value is high, how much effort is it worth to create and/or maintain ESM content? The

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purpose of my proposed research is to observe, describe and analyze the way ESM differs from

traditional computer mediated communication in allowing new team members to quickly access,

use, and add to existing team-based information. My specific study group would be military

staff organizations, particularly those comprised of members from different branches of the

military (aka “joint” organizations).

Research Design

This study will employ the explanatory sequential mixed method approach (Creswell,

2014). As survey instrument will be employed first to collect pertinent quantitative data about

ESM, i.e. out who’s using it, who isn’t, how much they value it, the barriers to technology

acceptance, managerial support, and requisite demographic data. The qualitative phase would

use semi-structured interview questions to provide additional data to explain the results of the

quantitative phase. Any survey instrument for studying ESM could possibly leave gaps in

information or be too cumbersome. The explanatory sequential mixed methods approach is

appropriate for that scenario. With potentially hundreds of survey results, using an established

research design that allows me to further explore the results will add validity and clarity to the

study.

Possible sources of data and proposed data collection strategies

A practical approach to conducting the quantitative phase of this study is in an academic

setting. As part of their professional development, selected officers attend graduate-level courses

lasting 8 weeks to a year. In that setting, there is a focus on academic work that replaces the day

to day hectic schedules they usually experience. Support from the staffs at these academic

institutions could combine with the contemplative learning environment to produce an

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appropriate atmosphere for collecting quantitative data from a sample of the target population

(officers in joint duty positions).

Leveraging the academic environment and its relatively relaxed schedule, I could then

conduct interviews to further explore trends within the quantitative data. These interviews would

allow me to address the subtleties of the human experience with computer-aided collaboration

within a military setting. There are many reasons why a particular technology like ESM is or

isn’t embraced within a given organizational construct. Phenomenological interviews could

address issues hinted at, but not fully explained in the survey data.

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References

Creswell, J. W. (2014). Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative and Mixed Methods

Approaches (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Gerstner, J. (2015). Slogging toward the social organization. Workforce Solutions Review, 6(3),

12-15.

JETD, J. S. J.-. (2012). Joint Officer Handbook. Washington, D.C.: Joint Staff Officer Project.

Leonardi, P. M. (2014). Social media, knowledge sharing, and innovation: toward a theory of

communication visibility. Information systems research, 25(4), 796-816.

Leonardi, P. M. (2015). Ambient awareness and knowledge acquisition: using social media to

learn "who knows what" and "who knows whom". MIS Quarterly, 39(4), 747-762.

Leonardi, P. M., Huysman, M., & Steinfield, C. (2013). Enterprise social media: definition,

history, and prospects for the study of social technologies in organizations. Journal of

Computer-Mediated Communication, 19(1), 1-19. doi:10.1111/jcc4.12029

Mark, G., Voida, S., & Cardello, A. (2012). "A pace not dictated by electrons": an empirical

study of work without email. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the SIGCHI

Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Austin, Texas, USA.

Naimoli, M., & Fari, G. (2008). Breaking barriers to enterprise content management. Applied

Clinical Trials, 17(9), 58-64.

Pees, R. C., Glenda Hostetter, S., & Ziegenfuss, J. T. (2009). Organizational consciousness.

Journal of Health Organization and Management, 23(5), 505-521.

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/14777260910984005

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Treem, J. W., & Leonardi, P. M. (2012). Social media use in organizations: Exploring the

affordances of visibility, editability, persistence, and association. Communication

yearbook, 36, 143-189.

Turban, E., Bolloju, N., & Liang, T.-P. (2011). Enterprise social networking: opportunities,

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Commerce, 21(3), 202-220. doi:10.1080/10919392.2011.590109

Turban, E., Volonino, L., Wood, G. R., & Sipior, J. C. (2013). Information technology for

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Walker, N. R. (2014). Social computing: A multiple regression analysis for assessing

government employees' likelihood of contributing. (3610272 Ph.D.), Capella University,

Ann Arbor. Retrieved from

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