Knowledge Management 2.0: ROI is dead. Long live SNA

In one of my previous posts I mentioned how difficult is to measure the benefits of Web 2.0 for Knowledge Management in terms of ROI. Also, this topic has brough on many voices out there in the blogosphere. As discussed, the knowledge of workers is something hardly measurable but very valuable, and the benefits should be measured by the business impacts, like business eficiency or the competitive advantage, and ROI is not the proper tool to do this.

However, if we want to measure the benefits of KM 2.0, we need to focus on the core value, this is, the network effects. For this purpose, we can use more appropriated tools like Social Network Analysis (SNA), which provides a collection of methods to measure the relationships and flows between any information/knowledge processing entity in a social network. Things like “Degrees”, “Betweenness”, “Closeness” can provide significant figures that might help to understand how positively or negatively a social network is working. Come on, read this gem taken from the IBM Research Center at Watson:

Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a set of methods and statistics that reveals the hidden connections that are important for sharing information, decision-making, and innovation. The outcome of an SNA helps us to see where collaboration is breaking down, where talent and expertise could be better leveraged, where decisions are getting bogged down or where opportunities for innovation are being lost. The data give us the picture we need to create a set of remedial actions for individuals and leaders to improve productivity, efficiency and innovation.

In this manner, SNA can provide managers with a clear picture of how employees are working together, and measure the benefits of Enterprise Web 2.0 for Knowledge Management in terms of social capital. As Jim Petrassi and Sharon Whitaker state in their paper “Strategic Innovation and the Impact on Collaboration Technologies”, many leading companies are using SNA tools and techniques to identify the “go-to” expert, find technical knowledge and expertise, identify obstacles to collaboration, develop knowledge transfer programs and develop targeted team building programs.

Recapping…if you are asked to show the ROI of KM 2.0, just reply that if they want real figures, they should do SNA.

Web 2.0 – SOA Convergence

There is an obvious convergence between Web 2.0 and SOA, more concretly between Mash-Up applications and Composite Applications. On one hand, the content of a Mash-Up application is composed by the aggregation of different sources of data, consumed from services offered by other Web applications over the HTTP protocol. On the other hand, a Composite Application in a SOA does not have to be Web-based, as the content is built up from business services connected to different sources of data like Databases, EJB or MQ using disparate communication protocols like JDBC, JNDI or JMS respectively.

Therefore, a Mash-Up application can be defined as a SOA Web Composite Application where the source data is gathered from Web services from other Web applications. This integration scenario is not new, but the innovation introduced by Web 2.0 is in terms of how these services are provided with new technologies like RSS and how they are consumed in the browser side with JavaScript.

Under this framework, the roles of RSS and Mash-up editors in the world of enterprise Knowledge Management are quite interesting. Talking in SOA terminology, a Mash-Up editor (like Yahoo! Pipes) can be defined as a Knowledge Integrator where disparate pieces of information/knowledge are aggregated and transformated into one centralized output that can be consumed by any other Web application. Additionally, all the RSS feeds can be seen as the Knowledge Bus where all the information/knowledge is flowing in both directions (producer/consumer can interchange roles) and where application should plug in to gather information.

Why Web 2.0 in the Enterprise?

I am really enjoying my current assignment. I am doing a research work entitled “Next Generation Knowledge Management with Web 2.0″ where I investigate the benefits of adopting Enterprise 2.0 as a KM enabler. During the past few weeks I have been focusing on strictly analyze why Web 2.0 should be embraced by enterprises, and the following came up.

We know that Web 2.0 can provide great profits to companies. However, enterprises don’t have to embrace these solutions just because they are cool, just because they are on top of Gartner’s hype cycle peak of inflated expectations, or driven by a widely spread adoption in the current Web panorama. Companies do not work the same way the Internet community does, and a model that is working out there could miserably fail in the enterprise context. Therefore, companies should do a deep “soul search” in order to strictly analyze how an Enterprise 2.0 strategy should be incorporated into their organizations and find out in which business area the benefits of Web 2.0 can be fully harnessed. Thus, the best approach of embracing an Enterprise2.0 strategy is in the field of Knowledge Management, where one of the major benefits is that knowledge is open and globally visible to a wider scale. But while executives are always expecting big immediate wins and high returns after an investment, the benefits of this new strategy for Knowledge Management are usually continuous, linear build-up and almost never sudden and pronounced. This is driven by the fact that the ultimate objective of this strategy is improving the knowledge of employees, something that is hardly measurable but very valuable. Then, the effects of KM 2.0 should be measured by the direct impacts on the business outcomes (like business eficency or competitive advantage) and not by the ROI, which is more suitable for tangible assets. Having said all that, Enterprise 2.0 for Knowledge Management is not a question of “how to save money” but a question of “how to stop losing money”.

I am not the only one who think that Enterprise 2.0 and KM 2.0 are separate concepts, the first one being a enabler of the second.

Note: The quoted text is an intellecutal property of my company. Be careful if you want to reference it.

Knowledge Management and Web 2.0 – What a nice post!

Luis Suarez over ELSUA has posted a series of 6 posts talking about the impacts of Web 2.0 on Knowledge Management. In fact, Luis transcripts with his passionate style the highlights of a podcast held by Jon Husband and Dave Snowden talking about this same topic. It is worth having a look to give an overview of the next generation KM and how this discipline is finally compelling again thanks to the tools introduced by the new Web.

I personally contacted Luis after reading this post, just to ask him what is the role of these new tools in the world of KM. I know dozens of gurus who say that it is a worrying thing that many companies are trying to enable a KM 2.0 strategy by means of purchasing a product. I fully agree on the fact that in order to establish an effective KM strategy with Web 2.0, companies must be very careful to make sure they understand the network effects of the new Web. They should also assure that these ideas are not wiped out by a product that will be probably missing key features. But if everybody should use Blogs, Wikis, Social Bookmarking, etc…and we know that there are products like IBM Lotus Connections and Confluence which packages all this into one integrated product, why are not these IT products suitable for KM 2.0? How a network can be created without these tools? How otherwhise KM 2.0 can be enabled? Luis then replied with a ray of light:

It is absolutely true that there should be tools and products, otherwhise nothing could be done. But what we are talking about here is that one the major issues of traditional KM is the fact that during a lot of years, the strategies were focused on procesess and tools, rather than knowledge workers, meaning that people could not influence the way in which these tools were utilized. Definitively, tools need to be there, but with a minimal influence and always available to users, not the other way around. They are a mechanism to achieve a goal, not the goal itself, like it used to be in traditional KM. Here is where the real change relies on, as Web 2.0 and KM 2.0 are founded on the principles of openness and free knowledge sharing, using tools we all really know and like, without imposed structures.

Take that!