Self-Service Technologies and Enterprise Social Networks – Motivations, User Roles, and Knowledge Contribution

“The digital revolution has launched a new era of human empowerment and engagement across business, society and in every aspect of our lives. Never before has there been a more powerful influence on human behavior, irrespective of country or culture, than the combined effect of digital technologies. The effects of this shift on society are tremendous,” wrote Mervyn Eyre for Forbes in 2017. She is executive vice president of Fujitsu Americas and has more than 25 years of IT experience. People of the present generation have gotten used to various kinds of digital technologies. Technology-enabled media are used more than ever to interact in the private circle as well as in the business environment. In addition, they changed the way how customers communicate with companies. The result is that people are increasingly independent and at the same time more connected than ever before. In that manner, relationships are shifted from bilateral offline interactions to network oriented digital interactions. Pervasive connectivity, information abundance, global supply chains, and social media are concepts of people’s everyday lives which have brought our society to the new digital era. Today, worldwide about 2.6 billion people use social networks such as Facebook, with estimations reaching up to 3 billion users in 2021 which elucidates the immense interconnectedness of people among themselves. In addition, the last couple of years have witnessed a rising level of consumer acceptance of self-service technologies underlining the change in interaction between customers and companies as well as the customers’ increasing independence. Taken the example of in-store purchase, people want the fastest checkout process possible, and many are taking matters into their own hands by using checkout kiosks. Online check-in for flights, mobile ticketing via smartphone, or self-checkout systems in supermarkets are just a few examples that are taken for granted in today’s interconnected and fast-paced world. In addition, the worldwide number of mobile device users has grown to 5.035 billion, with the latest billion users being added in just the last four years. That means that about two-thirds of the world’s population now use mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablets or cellphones. In particular two new digital technologies change people’s behavior and have already found their ways in people’s everyday lives: self-service technologies (SST), which change the way how people interact with companies, and enterprise social networks (ESN), which change the way how people interact with each other within companies. These powerful trends show that SST and ESN are of great interest for research and practice – and that their importance is likely to keep increasing. For this reason, this dissertation focusses on both subjects within the scope of digital technologies. First, this dissertation addresses research on SST as they have become an integral part of people’s social and economic lives and meanwhile are of undeniable importance for companies. The business opportunities SST yield for companies can lead to a competitive edge, which is why they have been gaining increasing interest in research lately. While kiosk SST, such as automated teller machines (ATM) in banking or self-checkouts in supermarkets, are already widespread in various industries, mobile service, i.e. mobile banking or ticketing via smartphone, is gaining in popularity and rapidly capturing the markets. Also organizations have recognized the potential of mobile service as it enables companies to collect valuable data on their customers, such as data on usage behavior or data through localization. Against this background, this dissertation focusses on two aspects of SST usage. First, it investigates the motivations to use SST by combining utilitarian and hedonic determinants. Second, the motivations influencing customer’s switch from kiosk SST to mobile service are analyzed as to get a more profound understanding of the drivers behind customers’ acceptance of SST. Second, this dissertation aims to contribute to research on ESN. ESN bear enormous potential for knowledge management within companies. This has been noticed by organizations and led to an increasing demand to better understand their role and impact on knowledge practices like knowledge sharing, information seeking, or expert finding. In this line of argument, there is a need to investigate different user roles in ESN usage to better understand the potential of ESN for knowledge transfer as well as the behavior of its users, especially with respect to information dissemination, contribution behavior, and knowledge exchange. Nevertheless, social networking behavior in ESN regarding employees’ knowledge practices, i.e. how users share and seek knowledge in ESN, is still widely unexplored. Yet, this is especially important with respect to ESN, as users largely differ in terms of their connectivity, their communication activity as well as their frequency, volume, and quality of user-generated content. Against this background, this dissertation investigates how users can be classified based on their knowledge exchanging behavior in ESN by proposing different approaches. It considers both – the structural perspective of the users in the network, but also the content perspective, i.e. the knowledge shared within contents – for a more comprehensive understanding of knowledge exchange within companies.