Enterprise social network is a representation between enterprise and their various stakeholders like suppliers, vendors, retailers, customers, partners, employees and the general public. In today's IT driven world, social media plays an important role in getting connected to the world. Web 2.0 applications have found their way into corporate practices, and we have seen a continuously increasing demand for corporate social software to support knowledge transfer and collaborations. The organizations are continuously trying to leverage the potential benefits of social networking. Today, organizations use facebook, twitter, amazon, YouTube, flipkart etc to connect to their customers but the enterprise social graph is much beyond that. Enterprise social graph enables organizations in knowledge dissemination, collaboration among stakeholders, to enable innovation and productivity improvements. Enterprise social graph has large potential in terms of workers engagement, connections and collaboration. With their social graphs, organizations can respond spontaneously to any call in their external environment.

Organizations had first developed enterprise centric tools in mid 90s which were mainly focused on exposing social information online. The second generation came in mid 2000 where the emphasis was on integrating work flow objects in stream and analysis capability but even after two generations, organizations had not been able to attain the potential benefits that enterprise social graphs has. Today we have entered into third generation of social technologies which are more focused to provide richer understanding mass data. To gain more, organizations are trying to integrate the social technologies with existing processes, data and applications. The suitable alignment of social technologies to ERP and CRM can bring efficiency to existing system. To be productive, organizations need platform that is secured, effectively controlled and easily manageable.

The major data sources for enterprise are Supplier portals, Retail partners, Business relations, customer interactions, E-mail interactions, Social platforms etc. Now organizations need to build infrastructure which would help to extract the most relevant information for maximum benefit. The developments in big data, analytics and artificial intelligence provide numerous opportunities for designing and understanding the social graph.