How widely have companies adopted social/organizational network analysis as part of their knowledge management practices?
The utilization of organizational network analysis has been rapidly gaining traction as the necessary tools have evolved in sophistication to exhibit the requisitel functionality and utility. Early attempts met with limited success for two reasons: (1) Attempts were made to deploy tools that were developed for social network analysis, in which patterns of communciation are adequate for description, to business and government enterprises in which the interactions associated with decision-making and task execution, and system interaction are focal; (2) The tools lacked scalability and user friendliness, and/or were too intrusive to be readily adopted by large, complex, and geographically distributed organizations. With the current generation of tools, the methodologies have been applied to some of the most challenging and taxing applications. Some of the cases and representative users in industry and government are provided the website for EnCompass Knowledge Systems, Inc.
