SNA and the Future of KM

Bruce Hoppe points to an overview of KM within a comprehensive survey of SNA, "The Network Paradigm in Organizational Research: A Review and Typology," by Stephen P. Borgatti and Pacey C. Foster, Journal of Management 2003 29(6) 991-1013. Bruce provides the KM section, complete with links to all the relevant entries of the bibliography, in his blog post, Social Networks and Knowledge Management . The authors suggest underutilized research of SNA that could have impact in the business world of KM practitioners.

They also write: “The term 'knowledge management' may soon disappear as practitioners rush to disassociate themselves from the relatively unsuccessful effort to use technological solutions to help organizations store, share and create new knowledge.”

There was a trend a few years ago to not use the term knowledge management as the effort went into a decline. However, since this article was written I have seen the term re-emerge, along with the broader acceptance of knowledge management. It is not a perfect term but a better one has not emerged and knowledg emanagement has become more common. Several industry analysts such as Meta and Gardner have noted the same trend in their reports. Unfortuanely I cannot reference these reports as they are for paid subscription.

I think there are several reasons for the re-emergence of KM. There are better tools out there. But more importanlty, after all the downsizing, companies want to make those left more effective and KM can serve this purpose so there is a new round of KM initiatives.

I certainly agree that SNA can benefit KM, as can blogs, wikis and RSS. These are all issues that I am interested in and I appreciate the contribution of Borgatti and Foster. It will be interesting to see how these more personal tools interact with enterprise KM. They can provide greater context as many have written on it.

Comments

[John T. Maloney]

Hi --

The re-emergence of KM traces its origins from the failures of the information-soaked, vendor-hype parties of the nineties.

In other words, according to the Gartner Hype Curve, we are on the 'Slope of Enlightenment.'

http://www.ayeconference.com/wiki/scribble.cgi?read=HypeCycle

Fortunately, instead of the legions of glazed Orwellian automata, leaders have accepted KM is a complex social process that depends on relationships, behaviors and cognition. Finally, they accept KM is orthogonal to their vast information repositories, sporty access mechanisms and rigid mechanistic processes, sometimes lovingly referred to as organizational concrete. As advised, their KM initiatives now have a personal, social and conversational focus, with the individuated outcomes as the penultimate goal of high enterprise performance.

-jtm