No abstract

In recent years, enterprise social networking (ESN) has gained a foothold in many companies. While there are numerous similarities between enterprise and public online social networks such as Facebook or Twitter, there are also important differences, many of which are driven by the inherent organizational structure of an enterprise, that make ESNs an important area to study in their own right. This paper describes the ESN applications that have been used within Alcatel‐Lucent over the past several years, focusing on the most recent. We discuss the tools and methodologies utilized to gain access to Alcatel‐Lucent's ESN usage data and to perform various types of analyses and visualizations of that data. We provide some statistics about ESN usage within the company and give insights into some of the questions that ESN tools can help to answer, such as the degree to which ESN applications break down geographic and/or organizational boundaries. Our analyses show that employees in the middle levels of the company hierarchy tend to use ESN the most, and that there is a considerable amount of inter‐country communication occurring. © 2014 Alcatel‐Lucent.

No abstract

Latent relationship discovery, such as the recommendation of potential friends, is a common feature in many social networking sites such as Facebook. In an enterprise, discovery of latent relationships is particularly important in helping knowledge workers discover others in their company with specific expertise or shared interests. This paper describes a methodology that makes use of user‐generated content and incorporates multiple dimensions, such as social distance, semantic distance, geographic distance, temporal distance, and quantity, to determine the strength of latent social relationships. Examples from the People & Projects enterprise social networking application and from work exploring the visualization of conversation patterns are used to illustrate the manner in which these latent relationships can be intuitively presented to users. Beyond social networking applications, this methodology has direct applicability in other venues such as contact centers, where the discovery of latent relationships between customers, agents, and contact sessions can be used to improve service and performance. © 2012 Alcatel‐Lucent.