Multi-level Social Networking to Enable and Foster Collaborative Organizations

Recent interest in capitalizing on the social network phenomenon has shown some relatively successful benefit to the business world. Social networking can sustain large-scale collaborative strategies between people and organizations. However, the main challenge remains the smooth weaving of social networks into organizations daily operations. In this paper we extend the reach and scope of social networks for an entire organization and show how they provide benefit to the business as a whole. We introduce a multi-layered social network model where people may play simultaneously one or more roles (e.g., suppliers, competitors, and customers) and participate in providing products, supporting services, and/or consuming them in sustainable collaborative environments. The experiments demonstrate both the widespread interest and possibilities of online social communities to foster collaboration among organizations.