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Using three years' data from more than 1,000 employees at a large professional services firm, we find that adopting an expertise search tool improves employee work performance in billable revenue, which results from improvements in network connections and information diversity. More importantly, we also find that adoption does not benefit all employees equally. Two types of employees benefit more from adoption of digital collaboration tools than others. First, junior employees and women benefit more from the adoption of digital collaboration tools than do senior employees and men, respectively. These tools help employees overcome the institutional barriers to resource access faced by these employees in their searches for expertise. Second, employees with greater social capital at the time of adoption also benefit more than others. The tools eliminate natural barriers associated with traditional offline interpersonal networks, enabling employees to network even more strategically than before. We explore the mechanisms for these differential benefits. Digital collaboration tools increase the volume of communication more for junior employees and women, indicating greater access to knowledge and expertise than they had before adoption. The tools also decrease the volume of communication for people with greater social capital, indicating more efficient access to knowledge and expertise. An important implication of our findings is that digital collaboration tools have the potential to overcome some of the demographic institutional biases that organizations have long sought to change. It does so, however, at the expense of potentially creating new biases toward network-based features—a characteristic we call "network-biased technical change."

Companies increasingly rely on open collaboration communities to create knowledge and organize work. Open collaboration communities are unique in that every consumer of the content created by the community is also a potential contributor. We show that consumption and contribution in open collaboration communities positively reinforce each other, but that the state of the content regulates that feedback loop. As content becomes more developed, it attracts more consumers, but these consumers are less likely to become future contributors. We exploit the abundant data available in our research setting to investigate the heterogeneity in these factors across different types of open collaboration communities. Our results have implications for both researchers and practitioners by suggesting that the feedback between consumption and contribution in an open collaboration community changes over its life span, that the productive life span of these communities may be finite, and that the type and state of the content the community creates may partly determine that life span.

This study investigates the effects of information technology (IT) on exploration and exploitation in organizational learning (OL). We use qualitative evidence from previously published case studies of a single organization to extend an earlier computational model of organizational learning (March 1991) by introducing IT-enabled learning mechanisms: communication technology (e-mail), knowledge repositories of best practices, and groupware. We find that each of these IT-enabled learning mechanisms enable capabilities that have a distinct effect on the exploration and exploitation learning dynamics in the organization. We also find that this effect is dependent on organizational and environmental conditions, as well as on the interaction effects between the various mechanisms when used in combination with one another. We explore the implications of our results for the use of IT to support organizational learning.

Past research into enterprise collaboration tools suggests they suffer because not enough people contribute. The authors point to the opposite problem: Too many people mimic consumer social media and post mainly to enhance their reputation, while too few are willing to engage with the contributions of others. The authors identify four types of participants and propose strategies for encouraging more social interaction and less self-promotion.

Abstract
The successful implementation of technology often hinges on individual beliefs about the innovation being introduced. Little is known about how social networks shape these beliefs. In this study, we examine: (1) whether individual beliefs about technology are influenced by the beliefs of their peers within their social networks (network content); and (2) whether changes in the composition of the social network over time (network churn) moderates the effect of peer beliefs on individual beliefs. We offer and test hypotheses about these relationships using longitudinal social network survey data from hospital staff collected 2 – 4 months before (N = 256) and 3 – 5 months after (N = 284) the implementation of a new electronic medical record (EMR) system at a large, academic hospital. Our findings suggest that peer beliefs about new technology significantly and negatively affect individual beliefs about technology in the early stages of EMR implementation. We also find that the effect of peer beliefs on individual beliefs is stronger in more stable social networks (i.e., social networks that experience few tie deletions over time) and weaker in less stable social networks (i.e., social networks that experience many tie deletions over time). Our study examines social influence in a novel context – the implementation of EMR systems in the hospital setting – and extends network theory by conceptualizing network churn as a moderating variable that may amplify or dampen the effect of networks.