Can Internal Social Media and Data Mining Be a Powerful Communication Vehicle in Reaching Employees in Change Management in Industry 4.0?

Abstract

With the rapid changes in the information and communication technologies through Industry 4.0, managers and change agents are now able to unlock wholly new streams in communicating change to their stakeholders. Social media can be an important “vehicle” to facilitate better and faster change management, whereas data mining can provide some crucial insight about employee perception about change. The purpose of this chapter is to capture the reader's attention towards the relationship between change management and Industry 4.0 tools specifically: social media and data mining. For that purpose, three in-depth interviews with senior managers of a Turkish telecommunication and technology services provider were conducted. The results support the research questions partially but point out new variables (national culture and generation gap) to consider in the relationship between employee behaviors and social media usage as an internal communication tool. Lastly, this chapter aims to provide suggestions for further studies.