An organization's ability to realize its full
operational potential is dependent on the strength of the relationships
between its employees.
Patti Anklam explains how social-network analysis can be used to collate
and analyze the patterns of relationships that exist in an enterprise,
and outlines the potential benefits the methodology can bring to a
corporate knowledge-management programme.
"Knowledge flows along existing pathways in organisations. If we want to
understand how to improve the flow of knowledge, we need to understand
those pathways." Larry Prusak.
The effectiveness of an organisation – innovation, productivity and
employee satisfaction – hinges on the strength of the relationships of
its people.
The sum of the relationships among people, norms, values and shared
meaning in an organisation is often called social capital. Social
capital may be as important to the success of an organisation as
structural, customer and human/intellectual capital.
In fact, all these latter forms depend to some extent on the quality of
the relationships among their stakeholders.
The understanding of the importance of social capital is now coupled
with discoveries and research in the field of the network sciences,
which provide mathematical evidence that there are physical laws that
govern the structure, evolution and characteristics of networks of all
types – mechanical, biological, electronic and human.
This research shows that `small worlds' are not just a curiosity, but a
predictable property of some types of networks, and that six degrees of
separation really is the average number of links between any two people
on this planet.
Social-network analysis (SNA) is a diagnostic method for collecting and
analyzing data about the patterns of relationships among people in
groups. Applied to knowledge management, SNA can identify patterns of
interaction in an enterprise, including its properties, such as the
average number of links between people in an organisation, the number
and qualities of subgroups, information bottlenecks and knowledge
brokers. SNA provides a view into the network of relationships that
gives knowledge managers leverage to:
o Improve the flow of knowledge and information;
o Acknowledge the thought leaders and key
information brokers (and bottlenecks);
o Target opportunities where increased knowledge
flow will have the most impact on your bottom line.
© Patti Anklam
