Last Thursday night I attended a seminar organized by the Information and Knowledge Management Society. It’s over a year since I went to one of their events, and I have to say it was a breath of fresh air! The seminar’s topic was Social Network Analysis, and was presented by Graham Durant-Law, a senior Knowledge Management practitioner who was visiting from Australia.
SNA is one of the topics that has fascinated me since I studied KM as part of my MBA; it’s a field that I’ve been involved in without realizing it for many years. The way things have developed for me over the past year mean that I haven’t really had the chance to do much work in the field, which has been a matter of some regret. Having attended this seminar, I feel really inspired to get back in the saddle and do something about that!
Graham’s presentation was followed by work in groups; I took the opportunity to discuss a personal project I’ve been thinking about that would depend heavily on SNA, and I got excellent feedback and suggestions from the other participants. Graham also made some suggestions that really sorted out some problems I’d envisaged with the implementation.
After this, I’m really looking forward to the next seminar, which will deal with taxonomy in Knowledge Management!
[...] already written about last Sunday’s Drunken Broadsword session. On Thursday, I attended a seminar, so I wasn’t able to go to my xingyi class. On Friday, I went to a friend’s birthday [...]
Hi –
Great post, thanks.
Social Network Analysis (SNA) offers a powerful academic tool for scholars and researchers. Network analysis in general is an important discipline for business as well. However, for business performance improvements, SNA only shows a small fraction of the picture. Key business processes, for example, are entirely left out of organizational SNA.
A far more complete method for network analysis of business is value networks. Value networks and analysis (VNA) employee the identical mathematical network analysis rigor of SNA but also creates meaning and mappings of the critical process infrastructure. It furnishes visualization and optimization of entire business and economic ecosystems, including social relationships, knowledge pathways and key business process. See comparisons:
http://kmblogs.com/public/item/166268
http://kmblogs.com/public/item/166232
Most value networks methods, tools, applications and technologies are open source, open content. This is the open gateway –
http://www.value-networks.com/
Cordially,
-j
http://xri.net/=jheuristic
Wow, a great comment!
Thanks for the links, I’ll definitely follow those up and research more on value networks.