Exploring collaboration requirements of heterogeneous teams on the example of a critical sales process

Web-based communities and internal social networks have become common part of the work environment in many organizations. These Enterprise Social Networks (ESN) link employees, capture organizational knowledge and support collaboration in virtual teams. Even though ESN intend to break up knowledge silos, improve communication and foster knowledge sharing, their limited ability to cover corporate workows hinders them from realizing their full potential. Information is often scattered either across several systems outside of ESN software or distinct groups and conversations within ESN due to the lack of support of cross-team communication patterns required in complex business processes. To discover gaps we use a real-world example and analyze a critical sales process. Thereafter, extensions to existing software are proposed with the goal to better cover the end-to-end collaboration in virtual teams. We discovered limitations in the group concepts and the mechanisms of sharing content between groups in ESN and conducted a first evaluation of our enhanced concepts with process experts.