Extending Social Network Diagrams for Large Scale Collaboration

An Architecture For Design

Figure 1 illustrates our approach. It shows what are currently loosely connected communities (Mintzberg, 2009) that collaborate to agree on a common vision. They can be communities within an organization such as planning groups, project teams, clients and policy groups. Often each community has its model or plan and must collaborate to integrate their plan with the plans of other communities. These communities work within an environment of highly structured operational systems to access operational data, share information about their plans, and where needed make decision on new directions to be followed towards achieving a community vision. The general scenario here is that the community members are provided with workspaces that include structured databases but also the communication facilities for collaboration. In this way they are enabled develop new knowledge based on databases in structured databases combined their tacit knowledge (Nonaka, 1994). The communities are supported by services provided by the cloud, which provides the services to support collaboration and enable all knowledge to be accessible within the enterprise.