I have written recently about the difficulty of “selling” or introducing network analysis projects. A couple of developments this week. Colleague Catherine Shinners alerted me to the recent publication of Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends 2016 report and especially a blog post, The New Organization: Different By Design by Josh Bersin (one of the report’s editors) that summarizes themes in the report. Both say (not loudly, nor in BIG LETTERS) that organizational network analysis (ONA) is something that firms will increasing need as work and management practices shift.

What shift? As has been predicted for many years, it is apparently now happening that companies are beginning to see their organizational structures in terms of networks of teams and that the organization chart as we know it is becoming obsolete. Another colleague, Jon Husband, has popularized the concept and importance of wirearchies. In fluid environments, it is important to be able to trace paths of knowledge through a company in order to know “who to call for what.” The Deloitte report offers one prescription for  designing the new organizations: to “consider performing an organizational network analysis.”

As those of us long in ONA know, a network analysis can tell us more than just who to call for what, it can also show us how important certain people might be in influencing change efforts or in bringing disjointed parts of a company into collaboration. I should maybe do a longer blog on that, but as I am pressed for time today I want to highlight a second fleeting moment of fame that might get more attention because it is an analysis of a popular television series, the Game of Thrones.

It appears that another group of mathematicians have used social network analysis to analyze the characters and their intricate relationships to determine which character is the most important and to try to forecast the trajectory of that character going forward. As a mathematical exercise, the results provide great examples of network analysis and the ways that math can be applied. One of the study’s authors, Andrew J. Beveridge, admits that it is a fanciful application of network science, but that it is “the kind of accessible application that shows what mathematics is all about, which is finding and explaining patterns.”

The legend accompanying the image summarizes the centrality metrics that are available from a network analysis. The lines are created based on a characters name occurring within 15 words of another characters name. The community colors, page rank, betweenness centrality, and weight are all metrics available in an analysis to highlight, in any kind of network, principal actors and relationships.

This is not the first instance of using SNA to map “GoT” (a longer post, Game of Nodes, is almost a year old), nor the first use of SNA to map characters in stories. The dataset for the analysis of Les Miserables is generally used in courses that teach Gephi, one of the SNA tools and there are numerous examples of how it can be used.

But as for Bersin at Deloitte and the folks at Quartz, anything that makes network science, and network analysis more visible and interesting is encouraging. Two in a week is pretty special. Thanks.

My last post generated a bit of interest and I was asked to do a “KM 101” for a consulting company that develops customized performance management solutions. Speaking with a few of their folks before the presentation I was made aware of the kinds of systems they develop, which have included learning management systems, systems that help sales reps manage time-sensitive inventory and so on. So I knew it would be important to differentiate, delineate knowledge management from related applications and systems.

One of the things I do in my KM presentations is review the history of knowledge management, using the “3 eras” chart I developed and then seguing into a version of Nancy Dixon’s model the aligns so nicely with the eras.

I’ve used these frequently. What I also wanted to do was to position the “dawn of KM” with respect to what I called it’s cohort: related business disciplines that emerged around the same time (roughly 1992 - 1995):

With respect to document management, I also shared one of my favorite KM factoids and that is that the trade magazine Imaging World, founded in 1991 for the document/ image/ management/workflow industry, changed its name to KMWorld in 1997.

In many implementations of knowledge management it is easy to see elements of each of these component cohorts as KM has easily blended with and adapted methods, practices, and tools from each of these business applications as they (and KM) matured. While knowledge management has easily been partnered with organizational learning, collaboration, and document management, CRM remains slightly distinct as these systems seem to be so heavily transactional and data-oriented.

Moreover, KM (because of behemoths like SharePoint and Jive) has subsumed (or is subsumed by — take your pick) document management and collaboration, it is the relationship and boundaries between KM and organizational learning that continues to spark conversations. A recent post by Ruth Kustoff highlights, once again, the alignment and focus needed to increase employee productivity.

Not long ago I noticed a query in the SIKM Leaders Yahoo Group about knowledge audits and knowledge mapping. The query began with the phrase “I am new to KM and have the daunting opportunity of developing a KM program in an organization full of knowledge hoarders and folks resistant to change. ” If ever there was an answer to the question, “Is KM Dead?” (another conversation in that illustrious forum), then this is it. As long as there are people out there charged with trying to get control of knowledge stocks and flows in an organization, there will be a need for KM. However you define it.

Personally, I began my career in KM and have never let it go. Recently I have had a focus on doing social network analysis in nonprofits, but that is because that is the work that came to me. Over the past year and a half, some KM projects have come to me and I get really happy about that. Why? The SNA projects are interesting but don’t satisfy my need to get my arms around big, juicy, complex problems — people and work habits, processes, technology and the realm of digital transformation. So I thought it might be time to raise my hand and say, “Remember me? I’m still here and still doing KM if you know an organization who might need some help making sense of what they are doing with what they know.”

To celebrate this, I’ve put a version of my “KM 101” up on SlideShare. It is the basis for the workshop that I conduct when I am in the middle of a KM assessment. I really believe that the most critical part of the assessment is engaging the staff of the organization from the beginning. So I do a survey, I do some in-depth interviews, I inventory all the current knowledge sharing receptacles and then in the workshop I talk about KM, key concepts, how to get started, and I feed back to the organization (with their management present) what I learned from the surveys and interviews.

Here are some of the points I made, privately, to the SIKM inquirer:

• If the organization has had a knowledge management program running, then the audit needs to look at all the existing tools, document repositories, etc. and determine which ones are being used the most, what problems exist, and so on.
• I typically develop a list of people to interview, ensuring that the list includes all the necessary departments or groups and people at a range of job levels. I prepare a list of questions, capture the responses on a laptop and then work with the data.
• If the organization doesn’t have a knowledge management program, then the audit becomes an educational tool. During the interview process I try to include questions about “what would it look like if we were managing knowledge well?”  The more people interviewed (especially if you include influential “change agents”) the more buzz you create for the program (or for what you are going to change).
• The audit process should also uncover a lot of “good practices” — work habits, repositories, tools — developed in one part of the organization that other parts might benefit from learning about. These nuggets can be the basis of “lunch & learn” kinds of things or starting points for thinking about things you want to spread organization-wide.
• Surveys can, in addition to getting information on what tools are used, can also take the “pulse” of the organization — asking people about how easy it is to find information, or to find people when they need help, about their perceptions of managers’ attitudes toward taking the time to share, etc.
• I also sometimes do an organizational network analysis as part of the audit to get a sense of how knowledge is flowing across the organization. This can get to some really good insights into where there are roadblocks to sharing from one part of the company to another.

Have knowledge about KM. Will travel.

I just spoke with Carol Rozwell a few days ago. Carol is a Gartner analyst who has been following social network analysis for almost as long as I have been practicing it. Last year, she and her colleagues published the Market Guide for Social Network Analysis. I have worked with a couple of the companies listed, as well as a few others.

Our conversation was similar to the one we had about 18 months ago: will social/organizational network analysis ever really take off?   Rob Cross did so much to popularize it across the business world, and Valdis Krebs has continued to use network analysis in interesting ways.  I recently posed a question to the SIKM Leaders Yahoo! group about the use of network analysis and received very sparse response.

Organizational network analysis (ONA) has always seemed like a good idea, and yet … there are have been some real barriers. The tools were, if not arcane, at least not very accessible to the people in organizations who might be the most interested in network analysis - human resources, organizational development, managers themselves. Some of this has changed in the past few years. Companies like Maven7 and Syndio, in particular, have integrated survey and analysis tools into web-based services that take away the pain of mucking around in spreadsheets.  For my survey and summary of the various tools available, you might be interested in the deck I posted on SlideShare:

The second problem with the uptake of SNA/ONA is that it is such a hard sell. My successes in generating ONA projects have come in two ways: first, from “believers,” that is people who have read enough or have had enough experience with ONA that they are convinced it will help them. Most of my KM  and nonprofit projects are in this first category. In these cases, I worked mainly as a subcontractor — providing the network analysis to consultants who were working a larger problem. Second, I introduced ONA projects as part of my own, larger, projects. The network analysis was a diagnostic introduced as part of a knowledge management assessment and/or strategy project.

A third problem may be with pricing, more specifically, return on investment for the project.  In the small sphere in which I provide network analysis for nonprofits who are using network-building as a core strategy, the hourly rate I charge is (I think) very reasonable. In the knowledge management context in which I work, pricing can be more predictable working with the new software companies who publish a pricing model based on the number of respondents. The software companies who are providing network analysis as part of a large-scale system change effort can reasonably charge, based on per-person pricing, in the 10’s of thousands of dollars, but this includes significant consulting work and the development of detailed reports.

I would love to hear from other practitioners about what they are seeing, what has and what has not worked. And of course I am always delighted to hear from anyone who would like to pursue an ONA project in their organization. Have tools, will travel. (or Skype!)