Social Technology Affordances for Business Process Improvement

Organisations across diverse industries have started to embed Enterprise Social Technology (EST) to create collaborative, human-centric environments in their day-to-day operations. With this growing trend, the use of EST within process improvement initiatives is gaining popularity. While the potential that EST brings (in particular with better connecting and influencing people's participation) to process improvements is widely acknowledged, research providing insights into how this actually takes place and specifically contributes towards process improvement efforts is very limited. This study adopts a 'technology affordance' perspective to identify and conceptualise affordances of EST within the context of process improvement activities. Based on forming theory on this topic, a process improvement effort that applied EST was investigated through a series of interviews. The interviews were rigorously designed, and carefully executed and analyzed via a tool-supported data coding and analysis approach. The study outcomes resulted with a refined and partially validated 'EST affordances for process improvements' model with 9 EST affordances and 3 'contingency variables'.