Design, deployment and evaluation of a social tool for developing effective working relationships in large organizations

Abstract

In an attempt to raise public awareness and promote their objectives, organizations increasingly strive for social media presence. Similarly to using social media tools to communicate externally, organizations are starting to adopt such tools internally to promote information exchange. This is especially the case for large technology companies with a skilled workforce, where exchange of knowledge and ideas can help establish working relationships and eventually improve organizational performance. Past experience shows that successful adoption of social media tools differs between cases, and is closely related to organizational culture. In this paper, we present an application designed to arrange custom lunches between randomly-selected employees and argue that a study of the organizational culture and subsequent application of the findings of this study to the design of the application has contributed to it's success. We determine success by exposing the application to trial use and evaluating feedback from real users. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.