Novel technological possibilities enable a better communication and knowledge exchange within collaborative networks. The paper indicates that the potential of enterprise social network is by far not exploited yet. Although systems are connected to each other, and the conditions for frictionless data exchange are created, there is a lack of flexible possibilities to use the data stock within the network efficiently and user-friendly. Chatbots provide a possibility to meet this challenge. Nowadays, chatbots are used to improve customer communication and simplify the daily routine in consumers' lives. Within collaborative networks, their use and benefits had not been fully discovered yet. This paper examines current chatbot technologies and implements a use case driven prototype to show the benefits of chatbots within enterprise social networks for (internal) communication by smart combining data across collaborative networks.

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As the number and adoption of social networking sites (SNSs) supporting business representation in the form of business pages continues to escalate, more scalable and robust mechanisms for integrating data from different networks in order to serve the special purposes need to be envisaged. An important concern of such SNS data integration is the platform dependencies that different networks impose in collecting, organizing, and presenting the business information hosted on their servers. In this esteem, this paper deals with overcoming the challenge of different business categorization schemes being varyingly used by the existing SNSs. In doing so, we present a content-oriented approach for determining the business category on the basis of a semantic analysis of the textual information available in the business profile. The approach has been operationalized in the CoDiT (Company Discovery Tool) which is a webbased tool to facilitate the integrated business page search over multiple SNSs.

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Product-related services are not sufficiently enough systematically and technically supported. Whereas sophisticated development and management systems for the entire lifecycle of products exist, the support of services is only insufficient. The authors’ developed a holistic concept as basis for IT support functions that are developed by practical reference processes.

Virtual organizations and enterprises are prominent examples for collaborative networks (CN). Trends like Web 2.0 and Social Media refine the technological base of CN, namely through enterprise social networks (ESN). To strengthen knowledge management and through it the innovation capabilities of CN, further research on supporting knowledge exchange and social learning within ESN is needed. Approaches like serious gaming or digital social learning already tackle this problem. However, there is still a significant lack in integrated approaches, concepts or tools for ESN and digital social learning. In order to address this issue, within the work presented in this paper a design research approach has been chosen to consider the lack of methodological clearness of the iteration process. Thus, the paper will firstly introduce a framework for the iteration process of design research and secondly show first insights on how to integrate ESN and digital social learning.

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In Germany, the importance of renewable energy resources increased significantly within the last years. In contrast to conventional power plants, there are highly interactive and complex value-added networks around such an energy resource. Today, the members of these networks mainly have to cope with information gaps or other issues regarding documentation quality. These challenges become critical in the context of knowledge intensive business-tobusiness processes. To encourage better business collaboration, a holistic knowledge-centered approach is needed. The digital Plant Lifecycle Record (PLR) addresses the given challenges in the context of wind turbines. Based on this approach, the members of the value-added networks cooperatively manage a plant-related knowledge base. By means of a use case, the general concepts of the Plant Lifecycle Record are introduced. Furthermore, empirically collected expectations of the most important stakeholders are discussed.