Social Network Analyzer prototype 1.1

The social network analyzer prototype aggregates existing enterprise data, using business intelligence techniques, to help you find entities/people based on multiple criteria, understand their relationships, connect with them and get up-to-date statistics on your organization.
The purpose of this technology is to deliver an environment where people can easily and quickly analyze corporate network relationships and find the information they are looking for in their daily jobs. The social network analyzer prototype lets you import and aggregate all the business network relationships between people that are already recorded in your business applications, such as:

• Management hierarchies from your human resources system
• Data on who worked on which deals, from your sales force automation system
• Partner, customer, and partner supplier contacts along your supply chain system
• People who work on similar transactions or projects within your operational systems

If appropriate, this data can be secured based on user roles and supplemented with other opt-in relationship data from employees so to help people find the answers they are looking for.

You can directly access and use a demo version of the prototype, with a preconfigured dataset, at http://sna-demo.ondemand.com or decide to install the full prototype and give it a try with your own company data.

Key features

• Searching for people/entities that contain specific keywords within their profile information
• Refining the search by using facetted navigation capabilities and automatically getting statistics on the number of people matching a profile criterion (country, project, organization...)
• Exploring multiple relationships between people/entities
• Displaying possible connection paths between people/entities
• Sending an email to the list of people added to a clipboard
• Copying people's profile information to the computer clipboard

New features in added in version 1.1

• Improved Search in Client Tool
• Improved Administration Console User Experience
• SPML (NW Identity Manager) and SQL connector
• Datafeed log display in the Administration Console
• Setup for quick install

There are three main tabs available in the interface:

The "Refine" Tab

You can easily choose where to start the network analysis by filtering people on any criteria available in the underlying database. The prototype automatically aggregates and displays data about the chosen group and let you further refine your result using a facetted navigation metaphor.

The "Explore" Tab

By clicking on any individual, you can view the relationships they are part of, switch between different types of relationship ("Reports to", "Is member of", etc.), and choose different types of representation (ego-centric view, standard organization chart, etc.).

The "Connect" Tab

The "connect" tab lets you determine the shortest number of relationship steps between various individuals, across the various types of relationships available in the system.

How does it Work?

The relationship analysis server loads information provided as CSV files. The administrator uses the administration tool to configure the metadata related to these data feeds, manage the processes involved in the load, define the security attached to information, and set up user's roles for people/applications accessing data. The social network analyzer prototype can then connect to the server and use the web services exposed to send its requests to the relationship analysis server.

The relationship analysis server accepts relationship information from any system, using a simple, open format and stores it in a relationship-centric database structure. Once the information is stored, it can be used to filter and browse the connections between any kind of entity (people, companies, products, chemicals, etc.)

Key Benefits

The social network analyzer prototype brings corporate business intelligence to the world of social networking. It can be used to augment and extends any existing enterprise 2.0 or social media strategies: helping locate experts in the organization, build communities, manage employee talent, or reorganize business processes. It's ideal for collecting people to work on cross-functional teams or analyzing relationships with your customers or suppliers across the whole business network.

This prototype can be embedded into any other application. Providing this type of collaboration functionality is a key part of the next generation of "business user" applications that use technology to help transform the daily processes of business people just as ERP systems have transformed operational processes over the last two decades.

Develop new client

You are a partner (VAR, OEM) or an application developer and you would like to build a  new client on the Relationship Analysis Server; you can download the API document. The purpose of this document is to show how a specific client can login, search for entities, extract profiles networks and paths from the Relationship Analysis Server using simple HTTP requests. Further analysis in this blog post from Ted Ueda. 

The REST API can be used from any language and runtime able to send GET and POST HTTP requests. As an example, the SAP Innovation Center built People Finder on iPhone. It is a the Mobile client leveraging Social Network Analyzer prototype.

It is helping to answer questions like:

• Who are the Product Managers located in Palo Alto working on Titan Project?
• Who are the German consultants specialized in that specific product?

 And act like place calls, send SMS/Email, Geo Localization, add to the IPhone contacts

 Get a demo video here.

Enjoy!

We hope you'll use this prototype to discover how easy connecting people and getting more insight on your organization can be. Please provide us feedback to let us know your use-cases and what you would like to get in the future versions.

Please remember, this is a prototype only and NOT for use in production environments.