Social Web for Business Intelligence

Goal

Enable Social Networking in enterprises and the interoperability between internal applications and public applications.

Summary

Recently, online communities of interest have emerged and started to build directories of references in their domains of interest at an impressive speed and with very agile responses to changes in these domains. One of the forces of the tools enabling these communities is their ability to turn usually passive users into active participants and producers. The diversity and the mass of users are used to tackle the diversity and the mass of information sources. Monitoring, market, science and technological changes is a vital ability of today's organizations, yet the growing diversity of sources to track in each domain of interest remains a challenge for any organization. Organizations actively look for "weak signals" and value-adding information and knowledge and try to manage networks of experts in their field of excellence. Therefore there is a growing interest in importing the tools and practices that made the success of these online communities inside corporate information systems. Organizations and communities leverage Social Networking to improve communication internally and externally, to help find people with the required skills and initiate and manage collaborations. This clearly cannot be achieved within Social Networks that are data silos.

Actors

• Alice, works at Company Zoe
• Kurt is the boss of Zoe
• François is a chemist at Kemics
• Zoe, is a company that produces small zoo like animals
• Kemics, is a chemistry lab

Preconditions

Social web apps are interoperable.

Triggers

Basic course of events

• Kurt follows several business sites and news places using an aggregator of multiple interaction channels used by these communities of interest. Although these feeds come from very different sources and by very different means (IRC, IM, micro-blogging, SN, etc.) they are tagged using a common framework and shared references and therefore he was able to customize the notifications very precisely. This morning he was interested to learn that the research lab Kemics announced a new bio-plastic that never gets dirty.
• Kurt selects the topic of bio-plastics and asks the internal social network of his company Zoe to identify experts in the domain. Analyzing the expert network and public online networks, the search engine is able to identify Alice, a chemist specialized in plastics and who did her internship at Kemics.
• Kurt sends a message asking her to evaluate opportunities on this new subject. The message is routed to her according to her status and availability: the system chooses SMS since she is down to the lab, her mobile in the pocket.
• Alice didn’t know a new plastic was released by Kemics but she uses here mobile access to a social network to poke François, her former adviser at Kemics. She also requests a digest of the latest publications and patents of Kemics related to bio-plastics that gets delivered to here by e-mails a few minutes later.
• Back to her office, reading the report, Alice identifies several experts and through François she gets introduced to them regardless of the social network sites their communities are using. She is able to exchange a few questions with them and setup a meeting at Zoe’s headquarters cross-checking her agenda, their agendas and the one of Kurt.
• Before the meeting Alice compiles extracts of the reports and her discussions with the experts on an online document only visible to the participants of the meeting; parts of the documents use internal sources and are only visible to her and Kurt.
• Reading through the report Kurt is able to trace the sources of every part and also identify a boss at Kemics he would like to be introduced to; he leaves a personal reminder about that only visible to him on the agenda of the meeting.
• The meeting goes well and everyone is able to contribute to the shared document using different credentials. Contacts, events and project opportunities are exchanged. It is the start of a fruitful collaboration between Zoe Corps and Kemics Labs.

Alternative paths

• many are imaginable

Post-conditions

A new community of interest is born and reified between members of Zoe and Kemics.

Business rules

Author and date

Fabien Gandon, 28/08/2009

Further References

http://isicil.inria.fr