Scientometrics, Knowledge Management, and Social Network Analysis

The following five practices can be used to overcome the barriers that undermine many organizations’ ability to identify and execute innovation opportunities:

1. Create a network-centric ability to sense and respond to opportunities. Building awareness of who knows what in a network is critical for people to tap the right expertise at the right time.
2. Develop an ability to rapidly test and refine an opportunity. Mapping decision-making networks so that emerging opportunity can be tried rapidly.
3. Work through people in specific network positions. Engage people who are information brokers who can reach out to other key connectors in the network. The idea is to bring diversity of people to work on the new idea as it  is critical to its quality and to the ease of implementation (i.e. preventing the idea to be developed in isolation).
4. Leverage energy. Mapping enthusiasm in networks to indicate who makes them feel energized provides a powerful indicator of where creativity and innovation are occurring.
5. Ensure that organizational context supports collaboration. Simply introducing a collaborative technology, tweaking incentives, or advocating cultural programs to boost collaboration is insufficient. What is also required is the alignment of unique aspects of formal organization design, control systems, technology, and human resource practices. Specific cultural values and leadership can also have striking effects of collaboration.

Source: Chapter 3 of Driving Results Through Social Networks: How Top Organizations Leverage Networks for Performance and Growth by Rob Cross

What is it that people actually do when they say they practice Knowledge Management? And why? They generally have two objectives. First they nurture the creation of new knowledge in order to speed up innovation and gain a competitive advantage. Second, by sharing existing knowledge they try to increase efficiency, i.e. prevent the wheel from being invented twice.

Christian van ‘t Hof further discussed three main activities related to the practice of knowledge management to achieve the two objectives mentioned earlier, namely:

1. Cultivating the corporate repository (intranet, wiki, etc.)
2. Connecting Experts through Yellow Pages (knowledge mapping)
3. Building communities of practice

Yup, that’s it.

Source: The Practice of Managing Knowledge

What can be expected from doing a social network analysis within an organization? What can be identified by analyzing the social networks?  According to The Leadership Alliance, here are some:

• Bottlenecks in key business processes;
• What would happen to a team if key members left;
• Sources of informal influence;
• Employees who connect to the far reaches of the organisation;
• A good candidate for managing a key department or a new department;
• Boundary spanners between contiguous network structures i.e. ’silos of expertise’;
• Degree of employee collaboration and interactivity;
• “High Potentials”; and
• Opinion leaders

Social Networks Analysis can also provide indicators for monitoring:

• The informal leadership of specific groups;
• Influencers on products/processes/services;
• Product/process experts (‘hubs’ and ‘authorities’);
• Fragmentation and ‘structural holes’; and
• The ‘reach’ of people (their influence)

Note: A social network analysis can be effectively done for a network group size between 25-300 (according to Andrew Parker – the co-author of The Hidden Power of Social Networks). If we do it for a network group with size of more than 300, it can be to time consuming especially for the person who have big personal network and if we do it for a network group size of less than 25, the group would have already known the result of analysis anyway.

Here are the seven Knowledge Management Principles according to Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge:

1. Knowledge can only be volunteered it cannot be conscripted.
2. We only know what we know when we need to know it.
3. In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge.
4. Everything is fragmented. We evolved to handle unstructured fragmented fine granularity information objects, not highly structured documents.
5. Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success.
6. The way we know things is not the way we report we know things.
7. We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down.

Note about point 3: In this podcast, Snowden mentioned that people will share if other people really need it, but if we asked them to share their knowledge and codify them into a database on the basis that other people may need it, chances are people are not going to do it.

Source: Cognitive Edge

This website provides information on, background material for and access to the statnet suite of packages for network analysis. Directions for downloading statnet can be found under Installation on the navigation bar to the left. The packages are written for the R statistical computing environment, so it runs on any computing platform that supports R. If you do not already have R installed, you will need to install it via the main R web resource-site, www.r-project.org. Instructions for installing R can also be found under Installation.

See more at its website: http://statnet.org/