Guest Editor
Professor Salvatore Parise
Technology Operations and Information Management Division,
Babson College
Babson Park, MA 02457. USA.
Tel: 781-239-6470
E-mail: sparise@babson.edu


Social networks are typically defined as the people-to-people connections in organizations that depict the information flows used to get work accomplished. Researchers in many fields including management and information systems have increasingly used social network analysis as a methodology to understand both the structure of the network as well as people’s positions in the network. This analysis has been very helpful in identifying and understanding silos due to geographic, organizational, and cultural barriers, as well as the performance implications of employees in various positions in the network, such as central, peripheral, and broker positions.

Increasingly, social collaboration IT tools, commonly known as Web 2.0, are being used by organizations to connect employees. A major benefit from using collaborative IT tools, such as blogs, wikis, on-line communities, and user tagging systems, is that it provides employees with access to knowledge – through connections to both people and documents - that they can then use in their individual work as well as on group projects. There is evidence that these tools are increasingly being used to build social connections, collaboration, affinity, and friendships/relationships among employees.

In this JITCAR special issue, we are looking to explore the research question: What impacts are these social collaboration IT tools having on the social network and ultimately business results? We are interested in case and application research articles that focus on (but are not limited to):

• The relationships between IT networks, social networks, and performance impacts
• Qualitative and quantitative evidence of how these social IT tools are impacting employee and group collaboration and affinity
• Case studies that describe IT networks and its impacts on innovation, decision-making, and talent management
• The impacts that these IT networks are having on knowledge management, including the awareness, creation, and exploitation of employee expertise
• A description of the types of social collaboration IT tools and important design features that enable social networks
• Theoretical and methodological contributions related to understanding IT networks, including defining meaningful constructs and ways of measuring IT network structure and people’s positions in the IT network

This special issue on social IT networks is planned to be published in the second quarter 2009 edition of JITCAR. The timetable for submitting manuscripts for this special issue is as follows:

Submission deadline: October 1, 2008
Author notification: January 15, 2009
Final Revisions due: April 15, 2009

Please contact the special issue editor Salvatore Parise, sparise@babson.edu, with any questions.