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Identification of User Roles in Enterprise Social Networks: Method Development and Application

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Abstract

The importance of gaining insights into informal organizational structures for management purposes is acknowledged by both research and practice. However, “traditional” approaches to analyzing informal organizational social networks involve significant manual effort and do not scale for larger datasets. Enterprise Social Networks (ESN) have emerged as important tools for informal employee interactions, such as for problem-solving and information sharing. While the analysis of ESN back end data might provide insights into the informal fabric of organizations, and in particular employees’ roles in such networks, there is a lack of systematic approaches for carrying out ESN analytics, such as for user role identification. Following a design science research process, a process-based method to identify user roles from ESN data was developed and evaluated. The method’s efficacy is demonstrated through an in-depth application in a case study of Australian professional services firm Deloitte. In doing so the paper shows how ESN data can be utilized to derive metrics that characterize participation behavior, message content, and structural network positions of ESN users.

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(Based on Chapman et al. 2000, p. 12)

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Notes

  1. https://www.swoopanalytics.com/.

  2. See Chapman et al. (2000) for details on the six phases of CRISP-DM.

  3. As information regarding “likes” or points awarded for posts was not part of the data export, keywords pointing to one user praising another user (e.g., “well done”) are also assumed to indicate the quality (e.g., Rowe et al. 2013; Füller et al. 2014) of a user’s contribution or performance in general.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the ongoing support of this research by Deloitte Australia in the form of data access and feedback via interviews and workshops.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Information Systems, University of Liechtenstein, Fürst-Franz-Josef-Strasse, 9490, Vaduz, Liechtenstein

    Janine Hacker

  2. Institute of Information Systems, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Lange Gasse 20, 90403, Nuremberg, Germany

    Janine Hacker

  3. Discipline of Business Information Systems, The University of Sydney, Abercrombie Business School Building H70, Darlington, NSW, 2008, Australia

    Kai Riemer

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  1. Janine Hacker
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Correspondence to Janine Hacker.

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Accepted after three revisions by Jens Dibbern.

This paper is based on the doctoral thesis of the first author (Hacker 2017).

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Hacker, J., Riemer, K. Identification of User Roles in Enterprise Social Networks: Method Development and Application. Bus Inf Syst Eng 63, 367–387 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-020-00648-x

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