Measurement of Social Capital in Enterprise Social Networks: Identification and Visualisation of Group Metrics

Social Capital describes the value of social structures in a social network. Effects of Social Capital, which include the improvement of knowledge sharing, collaboration and cooperation, can be observed in Enterprise Social Networks. Thus organisations are increasingly looking to employ Enterprise Social Networks platforms to facilitate these effects. The generated data on such platforms can be analysed to measure Social Capital. The measurement of Social Capital is achieved by operationalising Social Capital with the help of Social Network Analysis. It can be explained as the analysis of relationships between individuals and groups within a network. It is based on graph theory and
represents individuals or groups as nodes and their interactions as edges. Typical goals of such an analysis include the identification of influencers, leaders and high-performers in an organisation. This thesis proposes to represent social groups as collective actors to utilise already existing Social Network Analysis metrics. The metrics are collected in a metric repository which contains the calculation schemas and interpretations. The schemas formally describe how a metric can be calculated and the interpretations discuss the values of the metrics against the backdrop of the Social Capital theory. The metric repository is used as basis for the development of a prototypical analysis platform. The platform calculates all the metrics for a social network based on a realworld dataset and visualises them in a website. The identified metrics, their visualisation and the applicability of the group model approach are discussed.