E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

It’s Who You Know, but We Already Knew That, Didn’t We?

A couple of weeks back you would remember how I created a weblog post where I was providing some initial entry points on some very useful resources regarding the ever interesting subject of Social Network Analysis here is another article that I am sure you would be able to find it as enlightening as I did. It is titled It’s Who You Know and was put together by one of my fellow IBM colleagues, Kate Ehrlich, who is an expert on the subject and has been doing some really cool stuff about SNA for quite some time now. I am sure you may have bumped into some of her work already or even know her face-to-face.

What is interesting about this article is that for the first time in a while you would get to notice how the true value from a large enterprise is no longer residing in the different organisational units but more on the people themselves, on the knowledge workers, who through their informal social networks get to do their jobs much more effectively and efficiently as far as sharing knowledge and collaborating.

Indeed, Kate just puts together a very compelling news article where she is providing an example on the huge impact of ignoring or bypassing those social networks and how through the good usage of SNA things could be improved by being able to identify those key people hubs or key connectors that would get you to the right information and / or people. She gets to discuss a number of different ties (Direct vs indirect, strong vs. weak and one-way vs two-way or reciprocal) that will help in building up further those informal social networks. She also gets to describe the anatomy of an SNA, its relationships and attributes and how you could apply it to every single business out there. The more complex the better.

However, what I really liked about her article is the fact that she has also put together a number of different business applications for Social Network Analysis, which would certainly help everyone get the idea that for helping every single KM strategy to succeed you may need to conduct an SNA at some point in time. Something that I really agree with all along, and the longer that program has been running, the better. Here are the business applications of SNA in case you would want to have a sneak preview of them all:

* Knowledge management and collaboration. Help locate expertise, seed new communities of practice, improve cross-functional knowledge-sharing and strategic decision-making across leadership teams.
* Team-building. Facilitate post-merger integration or help leaders identify how to structure teams for innovation or structure and manage distributed teams.
* Human resources. Identify and monitor the effects of workforce diversity, hiring practices and leadership development to improve on-boarding, retention, employee satisfaction and productivity.
* Sales and marketing. Speed or expand the adoption of new products, technologies or ideas as part of an overall communication strategy.
* Strategy. Support planning and strategy for engaging in partnerships and alliances.

Not bad what a Social Network Analysis can do for your business, eh? That is right, it can do that and so much more. So whoever thought that SNA does not have much more of a business benefit than other traditional methods I think they should really read the article It’s Who You Know because I am sure it would be an eye-opener for most of them.

Oh, and one final thought, who would have thought that after all the focus we have been placing on tools and processes all along within KM for a number of years, it turns out that the one key fundamental success factors that will make your KM program succeed in the current business environment are the people! Does it ring a bell ? I bet it does …

Tags: Social Network Analysis, SNA, IBM, Kate Ehrlich, Knowledge Management, KM, Human Resources, Sales, Marketing, Strategy, Social Networking, Social Networks, Social Software, Web 2.0

A Weekly Glimpse of elsua – The Knowledge Management Blog – Week 41

You would remember how back in January this year I created a weblog post over here announcing my involvement with ITtoolbox by having a second weblog hosted over there talking about the same kind of topics that I get to talk about here in elsua.net. Mainly Knowledge Management, Collaboration, Communities and Social Networking. Thus elsua – The Knowledge Management Blog was born. I have been sharing daily updates in that weblog ever since and throughout all this time I have been finding out, through some weekly statistics I am receiving, that both audiences for both Internet weblogs seem to be rather different. So in an attempt to bring both audiences together I have decided from now on to share a weekly post over here with some of the different highlights from the previous week of my other Internet weblog in ITtoolbox. That basically means the Top 3 to Top 5 most frequently visited weblog posts of the previous week so that you, folks, get to see a little bit of what I have been talking on the other side.

Thus without any further delay, here you have got the top five links of the previous week with a brief description (Directly from the RSS feed) of the most frequently read weblog posts over at elsua – The Knowledge Management Blog:

1. Introducing Collaboration Technologies to the Enterprise Is a Challenge and How a Critical Mass of Early Adopters Can Help: The following weblog post touches base on some of the different issues that most large enterprises have been facing in the adoption of collaboration tools. Right after detailing some of those different issues I ventured into providing a potential solution to help with the further adoption of those tools and that is through the creation of a Technology Adoption Program with a bunch of early adopters that would help in the adoption of those tools in the first place. And I use IBM’s as an example of how it could work

2. Business Embraces Web 2.0 – Some More Examples: Here are some examples from a recent ITtoolbox news article published not long ago and that will actually show how more and more businesses are just chiming in and join the ongoing enterprise social software adoption that is allowing knowledge workers to be able to collaborate and share knowledge in a much more powerful environment than ever before. A news article worth while sharing with those who may still be a bit skeptic

3. Taming the Ping: Office Etiquette for Instant Messages: Here you have a weblog post where I have expanded further a bit on a very good news article dealing with Instant Messaging etiquette. Sometimes it is easier to follow a number of guidelines than having to face a number of issues. So here is my take on those tips shared over at MassHighTech’s news article: Taming the Ping: Office Etiquette for Instant Messages

4. The Web 2.0 Toolbar – The Best of Web 2.0 Right in Your Browser: There are times when you know that all of what is going on with Web 2.0 or the so-called social software is just too much for you to handle, right? Too many web sites to check, too many applications and offerings to test out, too many goodies out there that you just do not know where to start and at some point in time you may even give up on all of it. Yes, plain information overload. So what can you do about it ? Can you keep everything under control ? Perhaps …

5. 5 Key Steps towards Adopting Web 2.0 within the Enterprise: Find out some more about five different steps that would help you further in the adoption of social software within the Enterprise, whether you are already up and running or just getting started. Here is my take on such adoption and why your business should be busy with it.

And that would be it. Those have been the most popular weblog posts over at elsua – The Knowledge Management Blog from last week. Next week I shall be sharing some more. Notice as well that if you would want to check further on other different entries or follow up the commentary from the above links you can do so by subscribing to the RSS feed. Or, alternatively, you can head over to elsua.net and as part of the weblog template you would be able to see the last five weblog posts in chronological order so that you know what is going on in my head on a daily basis.

Tags: elsua, ITtoolbox, Knowledge Management, KM, Communities, Social Networking, Social Software, Web 2.0