Social Software as a source of information in the workplace : modeling information seeking behavior of young professionals in management consulting

The rising popularity of the social web and the associated change of static websites and their content towards open platforms of social sharing, collaboration, and user-generated data confront knowledge-intensive business service providers with the question what role social software plays as a source of professional information in the workplace. Due to the high affinity and familiarity of young internet users with such services, it needs to be analyzed whether and, if yes, how employers need to adapt their electronic information environments to the expectations and behaviors of job entrants. In the course of this doctoral dissertation of information science this problem is addressed in a specific context of use and scientific research environment. The information seeking behavior of young professionals in management consulting is analyzed by assessing the fit of existing analytical and process models of information seeking in regards to the research interest of this thesis and their validity for the context of use. This is achieved through qualitative observation and semi-structured interviews. The identified shortcomings and criticism of existing research results in the development of a task-specific model of information seeking that enables the design of a context-specific online survey of the information source usage of the examined population (n=115). The results of this multi-layered methodical approach show that in spite of the identified potential of external wikis and social intranet sites to serve as sources of social information, particularly for supporting young professionals in management consulting in gathering an overview of existing sources and evaluating the retrieved information and its quality, the high frequency of use of social web services for private purposes is not transferred to the usage for professional purposes. In the course of a leadership workshop measures for leveraging the realization of the identified potential are derived and aligned to the process of task-based information seeking behavior of young professionals. This leads to the reflection of context-specific challenges and conflicting interests of including social software as a source of information from a management perspective.