An Enterprise Social Analytics Dashboard to Support Competence Valorization and Diversity Management

Abstract

This paper describes an Enterprise Social Analytics Dashboard (ESAD) to support human capital management, competence valorization, diversity management, and early detection of potential problems within large, networked organizations. The system can be used by managers for career promotion, team building, and diversity management, as well as by company’s social analysts, to monitor social behaviors and information flow in the workplace. Toward this end, we defined a measure of informal leadership which draws on organization theory and on a computational model based on multiplex networks. This model, along with a social network analysis toolkit developed in the context of the present study, enabled the systematic empirical analysis of social behaviors in a three-year dataset of message threads exchanged within a large multinational enterprise, as a function of gender, time, roles, and discussed topics. The results of our empirical analysis demonstrate the power of social analytics in organizations as a tool for human capital management, competence valorization, and early detection of potential problems. Our study clearly shows that Enterprise Social Networks are a favorable environment to highlight women’s leadership qualities and intermediary abilities. The ESAD offers innovative features, such as a sociologically motivated leadership model based on multiplex networks, text mining, and text classification techniques, to extract relevant discussion topics.