As the workplace becomes increasingly digital, tasks have shifted from being physically demanding to instead digitally processing knowledge and information. Employees are therefore regarded as knowledge workers and for them to succeed in the digital workplace, they place high demands on IT systems that encourage communication, collaboration and document management. To meet the knowledge workers needs, it has become increasingly common to implement collaboration platforms. However, organizations often implement collaboration platforms without further thought about how they should be used. At the same time, there is no knowledge of previous research that shows what factors make employees use collaboration platforms. The purpose of the thesis is therefore to investigate which factors lead to IT accustomed knowledge workers in the IT consulting industry using the collaboration platform in the digital workplace. By examining knowledge workers' perceptions of their use, we hope to be able to find answers to the factors that contribute to the use of collaboration platforms. The thesis applies a qualitative approach through semi-structured interviews on ten IT accustomed knowledge workers divided into two organizations in the IT consulting industry. To consider socio-technical aspects of use, empiricism has been analyzed with a conceptual model that integrates Theory of planned behavior and Technology acceptance model. Our results show that attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control, perceived usefulness and perceived ease-of-use play an influential role in the use of collaboration platforms. At the same time, subjective norms and perceived usefulness are proposed to be the factors that have the strongest impact on use. / I takt med digitaliseringen av arbetsplatsen har arbetsuppgifter övergått till att istället digitalt bearbeta kunskap och information. Anställda betraktas därför som kunskapsarbetare och för att de ska lyckas i sitt arbete ställer de höga krav på IT-system som uppmuntrar kommunikation, samarbete och dokumenthantering. För att tillgodose detta behov har det blivit allt vanligare att implementera samarbetsplattformar. Organisationer implementerar ofta samarbetsplattformar utan vidare eftertanke kring hur de ska användas. Samtidigt finns det ingen kännedom om tidigare forskning som visar vilka faktorer som får anställda att använda samarbetsplattformar. Syftet med uppsatsen är därför att undersöka vilka faktorer som leder till att IT-vana kunskapsarbetare inom IT-konsultbranschen använder samarbetsplattformen inom den digitala arbetsplatsen. Genom att undersöka kunskapsarbetares uppfattning om deras användande hoppas vi kunna finna svar på vilka faktorer som bidrar till användande av samarbetsplattformar. Uppsatsen tillämpar kvalitativa semistrukturerade intervjuer på tio IT-vana kunskapsarbetare uppdelat på två organisationer inom IT-konsultbranschen. För att ta hänsyn till socio-tekniska aspekter vid användande har empirin analyserats med en konceptuell modell som integrerat Theory of planned behavior och Technology acceptance model. Våra resultat visar att attityd, subjektiva normen, upplevd beteendekontroll, upplevd användbarhet och upplevd användarvänlighet har en påverkande roll för användandet av samarbetsplattformar. Samtidigt föreslås subjektiva normer och upplevd användbarhet vara de faktorer som har starkast påverkan på användande.

Over the recent years, the paradigm of Innovation Laboratories (abr. InnoLabs) is gaining an increasing attention among business organizations as a potential source of assistance in the process of the development of new or the improvement of their existing products and/or services. Business organizations approach the InnoLabs in the search for assistance in dealing with the challenges of the often times complex and uncertain innovation process, and ultimately become successful in their innovation projects. Although the overall goal of the existing InnoLabs is to support the systematic, effective, and efficient innovation development, they target different innovation challenges and thereby vary in their focus and service offerings. As a consequence, all the innovation support that might be needed in the course of an innovation process remains dispersed among different InnoLabs. In this esteem, this thesis aims to centralize all the mediated support offered by the existing InnoLabs by bringing them into a collaborative network. In pursuance of this, initially, the diversity among the existing InnoLabs in terms of their structural and functional manifestations is explored by employing a triangulation of online survey and in-depth expert interviews with the InnoLab facilitators. Subsequently, based on the diversity observed herein, the incentives, approaches, and possibilities of interconnection among InnoLabs are determined. Having conceptualized the framework for inter-InnoLab collaboration, the next part of this thesis deals with facilitating such collaborations in an online space. The internet, since its inception, has drastically altered the practices of intra- and inter-organizational connectivity. Recently, one could observe a growing interest among all types of organizations towards the social networking sites (abr. SNSs) as an effective medium for reaching out to a global audience. As a result, a significant amount of business related information is already available and continuously accumulating on SNSs. However, the SNSs fall inadequate in supporting the inter-InnoLab collaboration because of the missing dedicated functionalities, isolated platform boundaries, platform dependencies, lack of support for domain-specific features, privacy concerns, and issues of data transparency. In response to this, this thesis advocates the designing of dedicated inter-organizational collaboration platforms with seamless integration of SNS data. Successively, employing a design science research approach, a dedicated, domain specific, and SNS integrated web-based collaboration platform (the InnoLab_Net) is designed for supporting inter-InnoLab collaborative activities.

Over the recent years, the paradigm of Innovation Laboratories (abr. InnoLabs) is gaining an increasing attention among business organizations as a potential source of assistance in the process of the development of new or the improvement of their existing products and/or services. Business organizations approach the InnoLabs in the search for assistance in dealing with the challenges of the often times complex and uncertain innovation process, and ultimately become successful in their innovation projects. Although the overall goal of the existing InnoLabs is to support the systematic, effective, and efficient innovation development, they target different innovation challenges and thereby vary in their focus and service offerings. As a consequence, all the innovation support that might be needed in the course of an innovation process remains dispersed among different InnoLabs. In this esteem, this thesis aims to centralize all the mediated support offered by the existing InnoLabs by bringing them into a collaborative network. In pursuance of this, initially, the diversity among the existing InnoLabs in terms of their structural and functional manifestations is explored by employing a triangulation of online survey and in-depth expert interviews with the InnoLab facilitators. Subsequently, based on the diversity observed herein, the incentives, approaches, and possibilities of interconnection among InnoLabs are determined. Having conceptualized the framework for inter-InnoLab collaboration, the next part of this thesis deals with facilitating such collaborations in an online space. The internet, since its inception, has drastically altered the practices of intra- and inter-organizational connectivity. Recently, one could observe a growing interest among all types of organizations towards the social networking sites (abr. SNSs) as an effective medium for reaching out to a global audience. As a result, a significant amount of business related information is already available and continuously accumulating on SNSs. However, the SNSs fall inadequate in supporting the inter-InnoLab collaboration because of the missing dedicated functionalities, isolated platform boundaries, platform dependencies, lack of support for domain-specific features, privacy concerns, and issues of data transparency. In response to this, this thesis advocates the designing of dedicated inter-organizational collaboration platforms with seamless integration of SNS data. Successively, employing a design science research approach, a dedicated, domain specific, and SNS integrated web-based collaboration platform (the InnoLab_Net) is designed for supporting inter-InnoLab collaborative activities.