When Social Media and Business Meet

From 2005 to 2012, I taught in the Information Systems & Operations Management area at Emory University's Goizueta Business School, across the BBA, MBA, Evening MBA, and Ph.D. programs. Two courses from that era — Social Media and Virtual Communities and Project Management and Collaboration — became the subject of a 2009 Goizueta Magazine feature, “When Social Media and Business Meet.”

The piece opened with a statistic I still cite: research at the time showed that roughly a quarter of IT projects were a waste — never completed, made obsolete, or never used — with another quarter to half only partially delivering on their goals. My research and teaching both grew out of a simple response to that number: organizations that brought social networks and social media into how they designed and ran projects built a meaningfully higher share of successes.

In Social Media and Virtual Communities, BBA and MBA students evaluated real collaboration systems for effectiveness, and worked directly with Goizueta’s CIO, Barbara Maaskant, and the school’s IT staff to explore how the school’s own Community Portal could be used to innovate its products and processes. Project Management and Collaboration went further, building a full project-management curriculum aligned with the Project Management Institute’s certification requirements around a central idea: that social media and social networks change how a manager should structure and run a geographically dispersed team. As I told the magazine at the time, “They distribute cognition and authority,” and if the technology is structured well, “these systems increase the effectiveness of team members. Structured poorly, they decrease productivity and creativity.”

To make that real rather than theoretical, I negotiated agreements with several Atlanta-area healthcare organizations to let MBA students observe innovation and social-network effects firsthand inside those institutions. Andrew Osterman, 09MBA, who took the course and went on to TA my Project Management and Collaboration class, put it this way in the article: “This class caused me to rethink the mechanisms and processes that accompany innovation in a corporate setting.” As the piece concluded, “By introducing cutting-edge technology into what could have been a conventional core class,” the course became “doubly useful” — giving students live projects to evaluate while helping them build project management skills that drove real value into the business community.

The research underneath those courses was published in the field’s leading outlets during this period: a Management Information Systems Quarterly paper on technology adaptation in virtual teams, a companion piece in the European Journal of Information Systems, a Journal of Management Information Systems article on socio-technical systems theory (with Robert Bostrom and Saurabh Gupta), and a Decision Sciences paper on how group ties form and affect project performance (with Elliot Bendoly and Monica Capra) — the same socio-technical throughline that has run through my work ever since.