Building implicit corporate social networks: The case of a multinational company

Social networks based on ICT (Information and Communication Technology) are nowadays one of the most popular services based on the Internet infrastructure. They are global phenomenon that greatly affects the modern way of life. Contrary to the widespread opinion, which assumes that social networks are interesting only for private users, these networks can produce added value in companies as well. The corporate social network is a system based on the web technologies that enables agile collaboration and information exchange within company. According to the method of making connections, social networks can be divided into two groups: implicit and explicit networks. While in explicit social networks a person herself defines another person to connect with, implicit networking is determined by a person's interests and by the level of communication and collaboration with other persons. This paper addresses the question of developing implicit corporate social networks. Based on the analysed communication performed through several communication channels (i.e. e-mail, file transfer, telephone calls and instant messaging) between the employees of a multinational company, we propose an algorithm for building the social network graph. Our algorithm calculates the level of connection between employees based on the level of communication between them. We verified the proposed algorithm on our prototype test application, the FER CSN Analysis.