BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION AND IT PROFESSIONALS
A Social Network Analysis Perspective
Susanne Berger and Georg Peters
Munich University of Applied Science, Faculty of Computer Science and Mathematics
Lothstrasse 34, 80637 Munich, Germany
Keywords: Social network analysis, Business communities, Business and IT professionals.
Abstract: There is ongoing discussion whether and to which extent and aspects professionals in the field of
information technology (IT) and business administration (BA) are different. Often IT people are considered
to be introverted while it is assumed that BA professionals are stronger with respect to communication and
networking. In our paper we take a social network analysis perspective to examine if this prejudice is true
for BA and IT professionals who are members of an online business community.
1 INTRODUCTION
Groucho Marx once said: “I would never join a club
that would have me as a member“. This seems not to
be true for those users who join one of the many
popular social network communities, for example
Friendster and MySpace.
According to Associated Press (Jesdanun
2006)MySpace now has 2.5 times the traffic of
Google, and is the top social networking site on the
web. Just over 2 years old, MySpace has outranked
other communities such as Friendster and Orkut.
While the social network sites mentioned above are
suited for everyone and any topic is discussed within
the community special purpose networks have
emerged also, like Linkedin or openBC.
In our analysis we focus on business (BA) and
information technology (IT) professionals who are
members of the business community openBC. It is a
common cliché that IT professionals have odd social
behaviour. They are supposed to stay among their
peers and have only rudimentary social contacts to
the “outside world”. In contrast BA professionals are
considered to display a completely different social
behaviour. Most jobs in this field require people to
be open and likeable, to easily approach others in
order to maintain business contacts.
The main objective of this paper is to find out if
this cliché is true for members of openBC. The
member profiles of IT and BA professionals will be
analysed in order to find similarities and differences
in the social behaviours of the two groups.
The paper is structured as follows. Section 2
gives a short overview about social network analysis
and introduces briefly online business communities.
Section 3 will explain limitations and the set-up of
the study. Section 4 will show the obtained results
and their interpretations. The paper concludes with
Section 5.
2 SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS
2.1 Some Foundations
Recently social network analysis (SNA) has gained
increasing attention in the information system
community (see e.g. Wasserman et al. 1994,
Carrington 2005, Scott 2005). Its concept can be
applied to many fields. E.g. applying SNA it became
possible to map a part of the network centred around
the hijackers of the 9-11 attacks (Krebs 2001).
Another early popular application area has been
citation networks in the scientific community
(Garfield et al. 1964, Scharnhorst, Thelwall 2005).
SNA is the mapping, measuring and visualisation
of relationships and interactions between informa-
tion processing entities, e.g. people, organizations.
The entities of such networks are called nodes,
the connections between them, links or ties. By
235
Berger S. and Peters G. (2007).
BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION AND IT PROFESSIONALS - A Social Network Analysis Perspective.
In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - SAIC, pages 235-240
DOI: 10.5220/0002343902350240
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

measuring the interactions of the single nodes the
relative importance of each node can be determined.
2.2 Online Business Communities
Online social networks have been around for many
years but the real boom started about three years
ago. They are part of the trend towards a “social
web”. The enormous popularity has lead to a
commercial interest and produced new sites like
openBC that charge members by offering extra
features. The website claims to connect entre-
preneurs, senior managers, freelancers and
“tomorrow’s executives”. But of course there are
lots of people with non-management jobs or
unemployed, students etc.
However the platform’s main target group are
people whose business success depends on the
ability to manage their network of contacts (partners,
customers, former colleagues, fellow students etc.).
3 LIMITATIONS AND SET-UP
3.1 Set-Up of the Study
For our purposes, it was necessary to select those
profiles to which the terms BA and IT professional
could apply. Therefore the profiles were scanned for
keywords related to the education of the member
(degree in computer science, information systems on
the one hand and business administration, economics
etc. on the other hand).
The user profiles were collected between
December 2005 and February 2006 from members
that joined the network recently. They were re-
checked 3 times (after 0.5, 2 and 4 months) in order
to find out in which way the number of contacts was
increasing within this time period.
For the analysis two classes of questions were
developed. The questions of the category A are
related to the attributes of a member profile only.
The category B question analyse the relationship
between the members. The questions and their
results will be discussed in the Section 4.
3.2 Limitations of the Study
Data extraction is tedious and time-consuming when
examining web-based social networks. Internet
based business communities do not provide interface
for data export and forbid the use of web crawlers as
well as the extensive use of a side that may cause
performance slumps. Therefore, in our analysis the
number of data sets has to be restricted to 50 per
group. Also the number of contacts of user that will
be examined closely with regards to the properties
will be limited to 5 per user. Besides not all users’
networks will be examined. It will be limited to two-
thirds of all users per group.
The paper analyses individuals that have
distinguished themselves by joining the community.
Therefore it cannot be said that the results also apply
to IT and BA professionals in general. Also the
amount of data is not representative. Furthermore
the interpretation of the results is based on
speculation concerning the social behaviour of the
individuals. E.g. if a user went to the same
university as its contact, it does not necessarily mean
that they met there. It can be merely coincidental.
The results can represent only tendencies of the
examined sub-sets.
Not all common SNA metrics can be apply in
our analysis and some do apply but cannot be
demonstrated or analysed as the authors had no
access to this relational data. Therefore only openly
visible data has been analysed.
4 RESULTS
4.1 Attribute Data
Attribute data have information about the user
groups that is not related to their contacts.
A.1: Are IT professionals more often freelancers
than BA graduates?
Result: 22% of the BA professionals are self-
employed, and also 22% of the IT professionals are
either freelancers or entrepreneurs.
Interpretation: As there is no difference between
the two groups, it can be assumed that this online
business community does not attract any particular
kind of person with a certain job-status constellation.
A.2: Which occupational group has the higher
percentage of premium members?
Result: In the group of BA professionals 24% are
premium and 76% non-premium members. In
comparison only 12% from the IT professionals are
premium members, 88% are regular members.
Interpretation: There is a considerable difference
between the two groups. It is possible that IT
professionals are more likely in a position to assess
the real value of an online service and are therefore
not prepared to spend money on it. General reasons
to sign-up for a premium-membership that apply to
both groups could be the following: (1) People like
ICEIS 2007 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems
236

to customize their profile according to their
preferences (Wildbit LLC 2005). (2) Users become
“addicted” to the network and are prepared to spend
money to extend their participation. (3) Members
want to distinguish from regular members;
“premium” is a key-word in this context. (4) Users
like to anticipate leadership. The extended member-
ship provides the role of an event manager. People
see a possibility to increase their own status within
the network.
A.3: Do IT professionals have a higher activity index
than BA professionals?
Result: The data show that the average activity
index of the two groups has no significant
difference. The average activity index for BA
professionals is 3.95, for IT professionals 3.85.
Interpretation: The slightly higher activity index
of BA professionals could be related to the fact that
there are more premium members among them,
using the service more frequently.
A.4: Is premium membership related to activity
index?
Result: The average activity level of all users is
3.9 (BA professionals 3.95, IT professionals 3.85).
The premium users among the IT professionals have
an average index of 4.10; the BA professional
premium member uses the network at an activity
level of 4.30.
Interpretation: This answer confirms the above
stated assumed reasons for signing up to premium
membership. If somebody spends money on a
premium membership to have more possibilities to
search etc., she/he will use those extra
functionalities. Vice versa the more active a person
is in the network, she/he will be more willing to
spend money for additional features.
A.5: Are users more often premium members if they
are freelancers or entrepreneurs?
Result: This shows clearly that self-employed
users are willing to pay for a premium membership.
45% of all BA professionals that are either
entrepreneurs or freelancers signed up to the
extended membership. This shows a significantly
higher percentage compared to the whole group of
BA professionals (24%). The analysis of self-
employed IT professionals shows the same
tendency: 27% of them had the premium member-
ship, compared to 12% of the whole group of IT
professionals, who had signed up for it.
Interpretation: An obvious explanation for this
finding would be that entrepreneurs and freelancers
are willing to spend a small amount of money if they
can increase their career opportunities. They want to
use the advanced search capabilities in order to find
possible business partners or customers.
A.6: Which group has more language skills?
Result: The language skills are depicted in the
following tables.
Table 1: Language skills of BA professionals.
Languages
Italian 4% English 92%
French 22% German 100%
Language profiles
German 8%
German, English 68%
German, English, French 20%
German, English, French, Italian 2%
German, English, Italian 2%
Table 2: Language skills of IT professionals.
Languages
Italian 24% English 96%
French 30% German 98%
Language profiles
English 2%
German 4%
German, English 62%
German, English, French 30%
German, English, Italian 2%
Interpretation: The majority of all members
speak German. This is resulting from the fact that
most of the selected users are located in Germany.
It shows also that the language skills of the two
groups are very similar – it is actually not the case
that IT professionals are less multi-lingual than BA
professionals. IT professionals need to have good
language skills, as the industry has a stronger
international orientation than other business sectors.
A.7: Which group is more restrictive in terms of
privacy settings?
Result: 12% of the BA group are not willing to
disclose their contacts’ names, whereas only 8% of
the IT professionals hide their relations. Regarding
their activity meter the two groups show the same
results. 20% of each group have concealed their
index.
Interpretation: Reason for restricting access to
the list of contacts could be that users might fear that
they reveal too much of their privacy. It is generally
known that head-hunters use the service to track
potential employees’ personal lives. As a central
feature of online business communities is the
members’ ability to contact other members, the
majority of users are prepared to disclose all their
BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION AND IT PROFESSIONALS - A Social Network Analysis Perspective
237

connections. If a person is uncomfortable with
revealing too much of one’s private life she/he will
not join the network in the first place.
4.2 Relational Data
The analysis of the relational data is the actual
network research.
B.1: Who has a higher number of contacts?
Result: The average number of contacts of IT
professionals it 21. BA professionals have fewer
contacts in average: 16.58.
Interpretation: Although one might expect that
BA professionals have more contacts, it turns out
that this is not the case. One reason could be that IT
professionals spend more time in front of the
computer and therefore have more opportunities to
collect contacts via the Internet.
B.2: Do freelancers/entrepreneurs have more
contacts?
Result: The average number of contacts of all
selected persons is 18.79. The analysis shows indeed
that IT freelancers and entrepreneurs have more
contacts than employees – in average 20.36.
However self-employed BA professionals show
even less contacts (10.55) than the average user.
Interpretation: The higher number of contacts of
IT freelancers / entrepreneurs could be an indication
that self-employed depend more on contacts than
employed. Their relations could be existing
customers or potential ones. A high number of
contacts could have the meaning of a reference to
other users that do not know the person. However
that self-employed BA professionals have such a
low number of contacts contradicts this assumption.
It is possible that some "freelancers” are unem-
ployed and therefore have less contacts.
5
10
15
20
00,524
Months of Membership
IT BA
Number of Contacts
correl(BA, IT) = 0.998
5
10
15
20
00,524
Months of Membership
IT BA
Number of Contacts
correl(BA, IT) = 0.998
Figure 1: Average Number of Contacts over Time.
B.3: How does the number of contacts correlate to
the duration of membership? Who is collecting
contacts quicker?
Result: In the beginning BA professionals collect
their contacts almost as quickly as IT professionals.
However after 4 months the IT professionals have in
average 21 contacts, whereas BA professionals have
only 16.58 contacts (see
Figure 1 for more details).
Interpretation: As already stated above, IT users
probably have more opportunity to use the online
service to gather contacts. A reason for collecting
these contacts quicker could be that they have a
greater affinity in adapting new technologies due to
their technical background.
B.4: How do contacts relate to the member’s
residence?
Result: The analysis shows that BA professionals
tend to collect their contacts locally. 29% of their
contacts live or work in the same city. Another 31%
are located in the same region. IT professionals
show a similar behaviour regarding their city
contacts (also 29%), but only 19% live in the same
region.
Interpretation: The high number of local contacts
confirms Boyd’s statement (Boyd 2004): „Most
users begin surfing Friendster by looking for people
that they already know, either currently or in the
past.” Before making contact to unknown persons on
the network, users start by mapping their currently
existing offline contacts. However a significant
difference can be seen between BA and IT
professionals. BA professionals have more local
contacts. It seems that IT professionals use the
business community to keep in touch especially with
contacts from whom they are locally separated.
B.5: Which group has more contacts from its alma
mater?
Result: Both groups have 33% of contacts that
derive from their university.
Interpretation: Again it can be seen that
members use this online business community as a
tool to maintain existing contacts or to reactivate old
contacts from university. This seems to apply for all
members regardless of their field of study.
B.6: Do BA professionals have more contacts to BA
professionals than to others (or IT professionals to
IT professionals)?
Result: In average 42% of all BA professionals’
contacts have a degree in Business Administration,
too. Only 23% of the contacts of IT professionals
have a degree in computer sciences or the like.
Interpretation: As many members do not give
their degree, it can only be analysed how many from
their contacts have the same degree stated as publish
in their profiles. It is possible that the actual number
is higher. However it is surprising that the number of
ICEIS 2007 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems
238

IT professionals’ contacts with the same degree is
considerably lower. This is contradicting the
prejudice that people with a background in computer
sciences prefer to stay among their peers.
B.7: How do contacts relate to current or previous
jobs?
Result: The below table shows the results for the
two groups regarding the number of job-related
contacts.
Table 3: Job Related Contacts.
BA IT
Same industry 34% 48%
Same current employer 17% 13%
Former colleague of
current employer
1% 4%
Contact works for former
employer
1% 6%
Contact used to work for
former employer
1% 6%
The correlation between BA and IT professionals
related to job related contacts is high (correl=0.95).
Interpretation: It is noticeable that few contacts
derive from current employers in comparison to
university contacts. Many members are young (25–
40 years old). Presumably they still have very strong
relationships with their fellow students. The online
business communities offer an easy tool to keep in
touch. Young professionals tend to change jobs,
locations often but the online communities are
independent from local limitations. Obviously the
members see not much need in contacting with
colleagues they see at work anyway. Users might
seek to gather contacts not related to a current em-
ployer to use them for future purposes, e.g. when
they decide to apply for a new job.
B.8: Which group has more contacts that are related
to membership of an organisation?
Result: Only 3% in average of IT professionals’
contacts are a member to the same organisation than
the contact’s owner. In the group of BA
professionals it is even less: 2%.
Interpretation: It seems that people do not use an
online community to maintain their co-members of
organisations. Besides the behaviour of the two
groups is almost the same.
B.9: Which group has more contacts that are related
to the membership of a community group (=forum)?
Result: Both groups have only 1% of their
contacts that are member of the same community
group.
Interpretation: Although the groups are highly
frequented in general, the analysed members do not
use it to maintain their existing contacts. It is rather
employed as a tool to meet new people.
Table 4: Common Backgrounds
BA IT
University 33% 33%
Degree 42% 23%
Status (employed, …) 65% 64%
Industry 34% 48%
Current Employer 18% 17%
Former Employer 8% 12%
Group 1% 1%
Organization 2% 3%
City 29% 29%
Area 31% 19%
Other (hobby, …) 4% 1%
B.10: Who has more in common with his contacts?
Which group’s contacts show more similarities with
its owners?
A mutuality is e.g. the same education or age etc.
“Behavioural science studies show that in everyday
life, people choose friends with similar age, income,
gender, marital status, and/or ethnicity, and that
similarity of interests is an important factor in liking
others.” (Cosley et al. 2003)
Result: Table 2 shows how much a member has
in common with his contacts. E.g. IT professionals
have in average visited the same university as 33%
of their contacts. Again the correlation between BA
and IT professionals is high (correl=0.91) regarding
this question.
If we count how many things a member shares
with a contact (e.g. contact x has same degree and
lives in same city => 2), we get: BA share 2.8 and IT
professionals 2.6 common things in average.
Interpretation: This shows that the kind of
contacts a person chooses is irrelevant from her/his
profession. In general people tend to make friends
with people they have things in common with.
4.3 Relative Strengths
As a summary of the analysis we present a graphical
comparison of the relative strengths of some major
characteristics of BA and IT professionals as
depicted in
Figure 2. The chart was built as follows:
For each aspect the single group result was divided
by the sum of the two corresponding results. Then
the questions were put in an order that shows how
the groups differ in their results. E.g. consider
Question A2: 12% of the IT and 24% of the BA
BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION AND IT PROFESSIONALS - A Social Network Analysis Perspective
239

professionals are premium members. The relative
strength of this feature for the IT professionals is
calculated as follows: 33.3% = 12% / (12% + 24%).
0% 20% 40% 60% 80%
Paying Members
Hidden Contacts
Location-Related
Contacts
Average # of
Common Things
Activity Index
Status
Hidden Activity
Index
University-Related
Contacts
Employer-Related
Contacts
Average # of
Contacts
IT
BA
0% 20% 40% 60% 80%
Paying Members
Hidden Contacts
Location-Related
Contacts
Average # of
Common Things
Activity Index
Status
Hidden Activity
Index
University-Related
Contacts
Employer-Related
Contacts
Average # of
Contacts
IT
BA
Figure 2: Relative Strengths.
Figure 2
shows that relatively more BA people are
willing to pay for the service than IT professionals
and have more hidden contacts. In contrast to that
the IT professionals only have weak characteristic
strength relative to the BA professionals: the relative
strength of the employer related contacts and the
average number of contacts are slightly more
developed in comparison to the BA professionals.
5 CONCLUSION
The common clichés about IT “nerds” could not be
verified - at least within the limited framework of
our research (see Section 3.2). For example IT
professionals do not have fewer contacts, they have
even more than BA professionals. They are either
equally or more open when it comes to contacting
with people from different industries or with
different degrees. They seem to be especially
interested in maintaining contacts with people that
do not live in their hometown.
A reason why there are not many differences
between the two groups could be that the
motivations, why people join a business community,
are for everybody the same. All users regardless of
their profession pursue expanding their personal
network. In joining a business community network
they fulfil already a certain pre-condition – besides
their offline network they want to maintain also an
online network. Therefore the findings of this study
apply only to the examined BA and IT professionals
from openBC. It is not clear if these results can be
transferred to BA or IT professionals in general.
This question needs to be carried out in a separate
analysis.
The data set for this paper was comparatively
small; therefore it would make sense to increase the
amount of data sets, in a second study, where the
technical means are more powerful. It would then be
possible to find out, if the results of this study are
statistically significant.
REFERENCES
Boyd, D.M. 2004: Friendster and Publicly Articulated
Social Networks. CHI2004 - Conference on Human
Factors and Computing Systems, Vienna, Austria
Carrington, P.J.; Scott, J.; Wasserman S. 2005: Models
and Methods in Social Network Analysis. Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge
Cosley, D.; Ludford, P.; Terveen, L. 2003: Studying the
Effect of Similarity in Online Task-Focused
Interactions. Proceed. International ACM SIG Group
Conference on Supporting Group Work 2003, Sanibel
Island, Florida, USA, 321-329
Garfield E.; Sher I.H.; Torpie R.J. 1964: The Use of
Citation Data in Writing the History of Science. ISI
Monograph, Institute for Scientific Information,
Philadelphia
Jesdanun, A. 2006: MySpace: A new online star that isn't
Google. Feb 12, 2006. Associated Press, New York
Krebs, V.E. 2002: Mapping Networks of Terrorist Cells.
Connections 24(3): 43-52
Scott J. 2000: Social Network Analysis - A Handbook.
Sage Publications, London
Scharenhorst, A.; Thelwall, M. 2005: Citation and
hyperlink networks. Current Science 89(9), 1518-1524
Wasserman, S. Faust, K.; Iacobucci, D. 1994: Social
Network Analysis - Methods and Applications.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Wildbit, LLC 2005: Social Networks Research Report.
[www.wildbit.com/wildbit-sn-report.pdf, 01.06.07]
ICEIS 2007 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems
240