Refereed Publications Abstract

KNOWING WHAT WE KNOW: SUPPORTING KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND SHARING IN SOCIAL NETWORKS

Despite the ubiquity and increasing ease of access to vast stores of data, people still rely heavily on other people for information, problem solving and to learn how to do their work. As we move further into an economy where collaboration and innovation are increasingly central to organizational effectiveness, executives must pay more attention to the sets of relationships that people rely on for these purposes. This article reports results from a research program designed to help managers promote knowledge creation, sharing and learning in strategically important networks of employees.

In the first phase, we studied information seeking from relationships that forty managers relied on for informational and learning purposes. We found that despite easy access to a world class knowledge management system and other accessible information sources, 85% of the managers indicated getting information that had an impact on the success of a project from their personal network. Four attributes of these relationships were discovered to promote effective learning:

Knowing another person’s expertise and thus when to turn to them
Being able to gain timely access to that person
Willingness of the person sought out to engage in problem solving
A degree of safety in the relationship that promotes learning and creativity

In the second phase, we worked with a cross-industry research group of 28 companies and government agencies to assess and promote information flow within strategically important networks of employees. In this phase of our research we found that employing social network analysis to map informal networks helps identify social and technical interventions managers can use to improve a group’s ability to create and share knowledge. We describe both case examples and a series of practices that various organizations are employing to promote effective collaboration in human networks.

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