BASNA 2011 - International Workshop on Business Applications of Social Network Analysis (BASNA)

Today organizations compete and survive in a networked environment. Their success depends on several factors, one of them being their “network intelligence”: the ability, that is, to understand the relations (or lack of relations) between competitors, institutions, partners, suppliers, employees, and customers.

Networks have always existed but the emergence of information and communication technologies has made them evident and traceable. Digitalized social and business relations may become the new data gold mine feeding business strategies and decisions. Analytics and data mining have traditionally been performed on the entities in isolation. Incorporating the insights from the networks potentially provides a new perspective on issues such as customer behavior, community development, organizational change, knowledge management, stakeholder management, interorganizational collaboration,etc.

Recently, Social Network Analysis (SNA) has emerged also as one of the most innovative and successful fields of management research, as several special issues devoted to SNA recently published in top academic management journals testify. With the digitalization of social relations and communications, management scholars are increasingly able to extract relational data from company websites, online organizational communications, news, and online databases. Also, new research tools, such as web surveys, web scraping tools, text analysis software, and data mining tools, facilitate the extraction, organization, visualization, and interpretation of relational data. Thirdly, the increasing computer power allows management scholars to process larger amounts of data (and relational data) using more sophisticated (and memory expensive) algorithms and statistical methods (such as Exponential Random Graph Models) to analyze larger social networks.

Management consulting companies, technology providers, social networking sites, and business corporations are starting now to address their attention towards SNA as a management tool and business opportunity. However, far from being a mainstream management innovation, SNA is still a research-driven set of theories and methodologies with little applications in the business world. However, the more company data are digitalized, collected, stored, organized, and integrated in enterprise data warehouses, the more data mining tools are able to extract information and knowledge, the more SNA will be able support the identification and management of internal or external social networks for the creation of business value.

The aim of this workshop is to encourage multidisciplinary discussions related to novel ideas and application geared towards analyzing social network data. By bringing together researchers in the fields of SNA, data mining, and management studies, the workshop will focus on identifying the “grey” areas of collaboration among their respective disciplines:
http://basna.in/call-fo-papers2011/

The role of data mining techniques in identifying scalable methods for the extraction and organization of social relations for management research and business practice
The role of management research in guiding data mining efforts and SNA metrics development towards theoretically-grounded discoveries about social network emergence.
The role of Social Network Analysis in developing and applying metrics and tools for the mapping, evaluation, visualization, and design of social relations in organizations.