Business Applications of Social Network Analysis: Proceedings of 2010 IEEE International Workshop (BASNA 2010)

Recently, Social Network Analysis (SNA) has emerged as one of the most innovative and successful fields of management research, as several special issues devoted to SNA recently published in top academic management journals testify. With the digitalization of social relations and communications, management scholars are increasingly able to extract relational data from company websites, online organizational communications, news, and online databases. Also, new research tools, such as web surveys, web scraping tools, text analysis software, and data mining tools, facilitate the extraction, organization, visualization, and interpretation of relational data. Finally, the increasing computer power allows management scholars to process larger amounts of data (and relational data) using more sophisticated (and memory expensive) algorithms and statistical methods (such as Exponential Random Graph Models) to analyze larger social networks. Management consulting companies, technology providers, social networking sites, and business corporations are starting now to address their attention towards SNA as a management tool and business opportunity. The most successful business applications of SNA in business practice deal with knowledge management systems, support to innovation processes, customer-relationship management tools, intra-organizational coordination. However, far from being a mainstream management innovation, SNA is still a research-driven set of theories and methodologies with little applications in the business world. However, the more company data are digitalized, collected, stored, organized, and integrated in enterprise data warehouses, the more data mining tools are able to extract information and knowledge, the more SNA will be able support the identification and management of internal or external social networks for the creation of business value. The aim of this workshop is to encourage multidisciplinary discussions related to novel ideas and application geared towards analyzing social network data. By bringing together researchers in the fields of SNA, data mining, and management studies, the workshop has focused on identifying the “grey” areas of collaboration among their respective disciplines. Out of the submitted papers, we have selected ten full papers and six poster papers. The papers deal with either methodological issues on network extraction techniques or on business applications using social network analysis tools. All the papers are available on the workshop website http://www.basna.in.