I enjoy conversation and have enjoyed this one, but to be perfectly honest with you, Luis, I am collecting material for our next book. Thanks for the links. Some interesting stuff there which I’m sure we’ll find a way to make some use of.

“Web 2.0 – looked at from the perspective of allowing us to “keep afloat with our social networks” as you termed it – is great, but the jury is still out on whether it transfers well into a business. [...] Now we have blogs and wikis to tempt people away from the work they were hired to do in favor of chatting socially to each other, without that dialog necessarily having a purpose related to the business that is paying their salary and on whose time their ‘social floating’ is occurring”

Hummm, so what are you doing over here, weblogging away, eh? ! No, seriously, it all pretty much depends on how you view it. You can certainly make use of Web 2.0 applications just for the fun of it to keep things going with your social networks. However, there is no denying that corporations and different business are looking very seriously into how they can transform those so-called Web 2.0 offerings into being able to provide business value / results by deploying them in a corporate environment. More and more businesses are starting to make use of weblogs, wikis, VoIP, social bookmarking, podcasts and other social networking tools as they see the huge potential they have got in the current business world. Otherwise how could we explain how more and more top executives are blogging out there on the Internet. Or how something so relatively simple like an online encyclopedia like Wikipedia has become one of the most popular resources for people to search and find the information they needed and which may not have been available before.

“It does not follow, however, that every KM tool is a useful or valuable tool. What SNA tries to do is turn the mutual rating of people’s social networking skills into the most important (though enormously vague) ‘performance’ metric by seeking to elevate that ‘metric’ – who is talking to who and who likes who – above the achievement of actual business results and without consideration to what I think are more important factors when rating people, like, for example, their character and experience”

That is what I called a bit of a harsh statement on SNA, Noel, and I would like to understand it a bit more. I’d like to see somewhere written how SNA is considered the most important “performance” metric as you state above when we all know that even today the most important factor, like you say, is if you are able to deliver or not. I mean, I do not know of anybody who has been able to keep a job by using social networking skills as opposed to their business skills. On the contrary I know many other people who have been able to keep up at their jobs because of their business skills without having a single bit of interest in social networking. And the proof is out there. I would love to be able to find some hard facts on that. Any takers?

“Keep in mind that just because something comes out of the KM stables does not necessarily mean it is valuable, even though it is backed by credentialled authorities in the field.”

I agree on that statement since there are plenty of different KM related disciplines which have been going through something similar to what you state above. However, there is a significant aspect that we should not ignore. All of those disciplines have already disappeared some time ago (Perhaps a few years) or are no longer in use; yet SNA is still going strong and our time will be far gone and SNA will still be there. I am sure. And just to show how SNA hasn’t got anything to do with that trivial concept of the gossip mill here you have got a couple of links to some interesting facts on the kind of impact SNA is having in businesses. And all of that from the point of view of just being another option to consider to improve the businesses. Nothing more, nothing less:

21st Century Knowledge : Leading Value Network Analysis
SNA and VNA Presentations: SNA

(Welcome to elsua, Beth! I have thoroughly enjoyed your weblog post with some very good references to SNA and also upcoming (tele)seminars on the subject. Thanks for linking those over here. Appreciated)

The power of social network theory stems from its difference from traditional sociological studies, which assume that it is the attributes of individual actors — whether they are friendly or unfriendly, smart or dumb, etc. — that matter. Social network theory produces an alternate view, where the attributes of individuals are less important than their relationships and ties with other actors within the network. This approach has turned out to be useful for explaining many real-world phenomena, but leaves less room for individual agency, the ability for individuals to influence their success, so much of it rests within the structure of their network.

Web 2.0 – looked at from the perspective of allowing us to “keep afloat with our social networks” as you termed it – is great, but the jury is still out on whether it transfers well into a business. Some businesses, for example, despise e-mail and operate without it because it wastes inordinate amounts of a worker’s time to read and respond to, at the expense of just getting their jobs done. Now we have blogs and wikis to tempt people away from the work they were hired to do in favor of chatting socially to each other, without that dialog necessarily having a purpose related to the business that is paying their salary and on whose time their ‘social floating’ is occurring.

You may say that blogs and wikis within companies help people do their jobs better by improving the flow of information internally and to some extent I am willing to go along with you, especially when it comes to Knowledge Management tools like IBM’s Jams “where the firm asks workers to suggest solutions to a set of issues or problems with no consideration given to their rank, job or experience.” (Thanks to Bill Ives for the link to eWeek). I can see a business benefit to Jams because it is directly aimed at solving specific business problems. Sometimes, after all, the best ideas can come from the most unlikely sources.

It does not follow, however, that every KM tool is a useful or valuable tool. What SNA tries to do is turn the mutual rating of people’s social networking skills into the most important (though enormously vague) ‘performance’ metric by seeking to elevate that ‘metric’ – who is talking to who and who likes who – above the achievement of actual business results and without consideration to what I think are more important factors when rating people, like, for example, their character and experience. SNA consultants would like to convince senior managers to consider social popularity the baseline metric for making further decisions. All SNA is mapping, essentially, is a gossip mill based on popularity surveys while keeping what is ‘learned’ secret from a majority of the workforce.

The SNA process communicates to people that a high social popularity rating is now a priority and causes them to focus exclusively on gaining (not necessarily securing because popularity is fickle and can be easily manipulated) social acceptance among their peers; a better incentive for people to waste time making themselves look good while sending levels of internal politicking through the roof I cannot imagine.

You like collaboration. You would like to see people collaborate more. Fine. Keep in mind that just because something comes out of the KM stables does not necessarily mean it is valuable, even though it is backed by credentialled authorities in the field. It still might not be all it is cracked up to be and I think this is the case with SNA.

Actually, and from what I know, and somebody can correct me in here if I got the facts wrong, SNA has been there for over 50 years and the reason perhaps why it may not have been very popular till now (i.e. Wikis and weblogs) is because till now people just didn’t think that the social networking skills were as important as they are starting to be considered now given all this social software applications that keep coming up all over the place and very much related to the so-called Web 2.0.

My understanding is that SNA as a tool is new, arising from a growth in wikis and blogs. I’m not sure that SNA was around before I was born, at least not as a tool that only mapped social interactions to the exclusion of other, and in my view more important, considerations.

I do not think that SNA is an ineffective tool, on the contrary, because just if it were the case why has it been there for so long, probably way before you and I were born, and why are there so many professionals out there who are taking this discipline so seriously making it their daily job for a number of years already. Ineffective ? I don’t think so, otherwise we would have some serious problem in here, I would think.

Instead of trying to blame managers for misusing an ineffective tool, why not just give them better tools? Sure, you can mow the lawn with a ruler and a pair of scissors, but why? The point I’m trying to make is that managers will base their decisions on the information made available to them. If the data they are provided with only relates to a person’s social popularity rating to the exclusion of all other factors concerning that person, as SNA does, then that is what managers given access to the data will base their subsequent decisions on: social popularity, because that is what senior management are telling them is important.

The Soviet Union employed a similar system: people survived based on how good of a comrade they were, or on how highly rated they were by other comrades. A person’s individual initiative, character, experience and accomplishments were all subordinate to their political skill at toeing the party line.