Visualizing Social Documents as Traces of Collaborative Activity in Enterprise Collaboration Platforms

Enterprise collaboration platforms are large-scale information infrastructures that provide a wide range of tools and functionality to support collaborative work in organizations. These collaborative activities leave digital traces in the form of social documents, which can be analyzed to understand how employees work together to coordinate their joint work. In this paper, we present the findings of a research project to visualize the structure of social documents to prepare them for analysis as traces of collaborative activity. Using the representation of social documents defined in the Social Document Ontology (SocDOnt), we draw on concepts from graph theory to develop a method for the graphical visualization of social documents. Applying this method to analyze the social documents in an operational enterprise collaboration platform, we identify and display different types of social document and define their characteristic structure. Our findings provide the necessary foundation for conducting computational ethnographies of collaborative work

The Structure of Social Documents

Enterprise collaboration platforms are large scale, highly integrated information infrastructures that enable many hundreds of employees to work collaboratively and share information. In this paper, we lay the theoretical and analytical foundations for the use of social documents as digital traces of collaborative activity in enterprise collaboration platforms. Through a review of related research and an empirical analysis of social documents, we identify key concepts and structures, providing the foundation for the Social Document Ontology (SocDOnt). SocDOnt expresses the generic structure of social documents and extends previous work in two important ways. At the micro-level a social document is defined as a composition of an intellectual entity enhanced by both intellectual and simple components and at the macro-level a collection is defined as an aggregation of social documents. These analytical constructs enable a more nuanced and granular analysis of social documents to understand collaborative activity in enterprise collaboration platforms

Metrics for Analyzing Social Documents to Understand Joint Work

Social Collaboration Analytics (SCA) aims at measuring and interpreting communication and joint work on collaboration platforms and is a relatively new topic in the discipline of Information Systems. Previous applications of SCA are largely based on transactional data (event logs). In this paper, we propose a novel approach for the examination of collaboration based on the structure of social documents. Guided by the ontology for social business documents (SocDOnt) we develop metrics to measure collaboration around documents that provide traces of collaborative activity. For the evaluation, we apply these metrics to a large-scale collaboration platform. The findings show that group workspaces that support the same use case are characterized by a similar richness of their social documents (i.e. the number of components and contributing authors). We also show typical differences in the “collaborativity” of functional modules (containers)