Extending the Social Network Interaction Model to Facilitate Collaboration through Service Provision

Social network technology has been established as a prominent way of communication between members of an organization or enterprise. This paper presents an approach extending the typical social network interaction model to promote participant collaboration through service provision within an organization, towards the Enterprise 2.0 vision. The proposed interaction model between enterprise network participants incorporates their actual roles in the organization and enables the definition of custom relation types implementing custom policies and rules. It supports a complex mechanism for refined content propagation according to participant relations and/or roles. Moreover, the collaboration of participants to provide services and complete specific business tasks through Social Business Process Management is facilitated by enabling the execution of specific activities in each participant profile according to his/her actual role. To explore the potential of the proposed interaction model towards Enterprise 2.0, two prototype social networks, developed to serve different communities and needs, are discussed as case studies.