Enterprise Social Systems: The What, the Why, and the How

Enterprise Social Systems (ESSs) are aimed at assisting the social collaboration across the organization and hence enhancing its productivity and business outcomes. Nevertheless, current ESS products do not actually fully meet these expectations. This paper thus develops a deeper understanding of the concept of ESS in the workplace starting from the characterization of social and collaboration tools. We evaluate current ESS products in accordance with a new typology of these tools. While highlighting some design issues, we conceptualize two scenarios for future ESSs: merging all of the coordination functionalities within a single ESS tool, or on the contrary spreading ESS's features within existing tools.