A Framework: Workflow-Based Social Network Discovery and Analysis

The purpose of this paper is to build a fundamental framework of discovering and analyzing a workflow-based social network formed through workflow-based organizational business operations. A little more precisely speaking, the framework formalizes a series of theoretical steps from discovering a workflow-based social network to analyzing the discovered social network. For the sake of the discovery phase, we conceive an algorithm that is able to automatically discover the workflow-based social network from a workflow procedure; while on the other hand, in the analysis phase we apply the degree centrality algorithm to the discovered social network, which is one of the well-known social network analysis algorithms in the literature. Consequently, the crucial implication of the framework is in quantifying the degree of work-intimacy among performers who are involved in enacting the corresponding workflow procedure. Also, as a conceptual extension of the framework, it can be applied to discovering and analyzing degree centrality or collaborative closeness and betweenness among architectural components and nodes of collaborative cloud workflow computing environments.