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Extension to October 20. Please contact the special issue editor
Salvatore Parise, sparise@babson.edu, with any questions.

Technology-Enabled Social Networks
Special Issue Announcement for Journal of Information Technology Case and
Application Research (JITCAR)

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
(http://faculty.babson.edu/gordon/jitcar/index.htm), 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