Jonathan Grudin

Over the past decade I have conducted studies of messaging, weblog, wiki, and social networking site use by enterprise employees. Some studies focused on Microsoft employees, some included other companies small and large. In this talk I will focus on a multi-site study of wiki use inside firewalls and a 6-year cross-sectional trend study of the use of social networking sites for personal and work purposes by Microsoft employees. Both involved extensive surveying and interviewing. Although the vast majority of enterprise wikis died quickly, we identified conditions shared by major successes as well as factors that appeared to contribute to failures. The trend study spanned the unprecedented rapid uptake and evolution in social networking site use; although benefits have clearly outweighed concerns for most of our population, we found a coherent shift over time in concerns, features, and practices.