Questions about Questions: Using Data from a Social Networking Application to Explore Enterprise Question and Answer Behavior

We constantly ask questions in our search for new information, new knowledge. Paradoxically, although question asking is central to information transmission, we rarely consider the processes that we use to ask and answer questions. The recent deployment of an enterprise-wide social networking application in our company has provided an opportunity for us to step back and explore some aspects of question-asking behavior. Social network analysis and other analyses of usage data from the application allowed us to ask a variety of "questions about questions," to understand information transmission through this important form of collaboration within the enterprise.