Collaborative Management of Applications in Enterprise Social Networks

Enterprise social networks are gaining momentum as a platform for collaboration between members of an enterprise, leading to the notion of Enterprise 2.0. Participant collaboration includes communication, information and data dissemination and also application execution, leading to task completion. This paper presents an approach extending social network data model to promote participant collaboration through collaborative application execution and management. The proposed extensions support not only process monitoring but actual execution, management and composition of applications within the context of the social network, in a uniform way. In order to achieve this effectively, external services must be wrapped and integrated in the social network environment as applications, and consequently they must be mapped to business tasks executed in each participant profile, according to their actual role and responsibilities in the enterprise. The social network framework must take into account the actual roles, relationships and responsibilities of the members of an enterprise, which, combined, dictate enterprise workflow schemes and policies. To explore the potential of the proposed approach, a prototype social network platform is discussed as a case study.