Sunday, November 2, 2008

Social Networks for Business: Let the Community Lead You to Success

We have a lot of information about theoretical side of networking in business and SNA; still there are only few examples of real implementation of networks in business and results of this in all articles. That is why I feel that the following article will help you to link theory and practice.

This article is called “Social Networks for Business: Let the Community Lead You to Success” and can be reached at:
http://www.cio.com/article/429913/Social_Networks_for_Business_Let_the_Community_Lead_You_to_Success?page=1.
The author is Paul Gillin (http://www.gillin.com//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=38&Itemid=113).

One of the main problems in organizations is knowledge transfer; and knowledge transfer is among the most mentioned purposes of networking in business. (The second is knowledge, or information, search within the organization or even in the outer sources. For more information about these purposes of networks in business I’d like to advise you the article “Social networks: knowledge management’s “killer up”, which is the easy-to-read overview of social networks in an organization’s present and near future).

Article contains several examples of how social networks help to create a useful environment for communication within multinational corporations and knowledge transfer. Hence the information flow doubles every few years and search for useful clusters of it has become the main problem for decision makers, you can easily link these facts about networking in business with the topic of the debate.

Here you can also find some additional facts about the IBM example, which professor told us about during the lecture. Unfortunately, the link on the web-page has a mistake. Correct link is as follows:
http://paulgillin.com/2007/11/how-podcasting-has-worked-at-ibm/

At the very end you can find a link of the blogtalkradio.com web-page with audio interview with George Faulkner who is in charge of IBM's podcasting efforts.

On the same web-site there is a related article called “Social Network Analysis Helps Maximize Collective Smarts”:
http://www.cio.com/article/print/6956
which examines SNA problems and benefits looking at the one particular example of SNA carried out in Mars.


PS. Here is the link for the article “Social networks: knowledge management’s “killer up”, mentioned above; access only with the VPN connection – it is from the EBSCO database.

http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/viewarticle?data=dGJyMPPp44rp2%2fdV0%2bnjisfk5Ie46a9Jr6yuUbSk63nn5Kx95uXxjL6nr0ewpbBIrq6eS7inslKxrp5oy5zyit%2fk8Xnh6ueH7N%2fiVa%2btt0ywqrdJtKukhN%2fk5VXj5KR84LPgjOac8nnls79mpNfsVbCttlG1qLFNpNztiuvX8lXu2uRe8%2bLqbOPu8gAA&hid=8

1 comment:

Christopher Tunnard said...

Great to have practical examples. The Smith and McKeen article builds on and expands what Cross and Parker say about knowledge management and communities of practice in their book.