Towards an SNA system for evaluating project virtual teams based on social collaborative platforms

Abstract

As project teams are increasingly becoming fluid and geographically distributed, they are more and more relying on social collaborative platforms to ensure effective communication and knowledge dissemination. However the use of these platforms poses challenges as they often cause information overload or hoarding and thus give birth to inefficient communication patterns. The study of these patterns with a network perspective is at the heart of Social Network Analysis (SNA), which is a descriptive, empirical research method for mapping and measuring relationships and flows between people, groups, and other connected information and knowledge entities. In a previous work [1], we proposed an SNA-based assessment framework to provide managers with a decision support tool to evaluate and diagnose virtual teams. In this paper we examine the process of building the SNA system based on data collected from social collaborative platforms.