In this slight update to a strategy article commissioned by CA Technologies' Council for Technical Excellence, recognize how the social use of information now determines how knowledge production creates value in the borderless network of the business. This broad discussion exposes a multi-level framework for identifying, designing, and channeling knowledge production, allowing cultivation plans to be developed selectively and pursued iteratively.

1. Strategies for Managing the Knowledge in Social
Networks
by Malcolm Ryder, Senior Software Architect, CA Technologies
Introduction
Enterprises increasingly rely on managing knowledge assets and knowledge
resources to optimize the relevance, quality, and impact of the work they
perform. Thanks to the web, these assets and resources are now found more
online than in any other location.
As a recent evolution of the web, social networking has profoundly impacted
how entire generations of people interact. These interactions have quickly
become an essential source of enormous volumes of knowledge. However, the
interactions and their results easily escape the supervision that establishes the
credibility, applicability, and actual sustained effectiveness of content provided
as knowledge. The management challenge is to make social networking
systemically produce high quality, high priority knowledge from its vast
capability to produce content and to convert the social network into a learning
enterprise.
Background
Before the current array of automated social networking techniques, the three
primary instruments for managing social collaboration were email, cultivated
knowledge-bases, and collaboration. Each instrument, in varying degrees and
techniques, captured and tagged content according to source, topic, and need,
with the option of re-use.
In handling the flow of information, the routine cycle of its discovery, validation,
categorization, and application relied on “information engineering” and that
engineering itself represented the level of business interest in prescribing what
should be known and communicated.
Social networking has introduced an "open source" or "crowd-sourced"
engineering of the information invested in the company's work. Social sources
readily extend beyond conventional boundaries of an enterprise, notably
including its reach, priorities, and budgets.
The natural dynamics of these social sources is often thought of as "self-
organizing," but for business effectiveness, the challenge is to strategically align
their dynamics with the objectives of the enterprise’s business workgroups,
whatever their diversity and size. Within that alignment, the dynamics must
convert content to the knowledge needed by the business.
Managing Social Information
The alignment of social networking’s dynamics poses three areas of management
focus:
• Scale (How much is enough, and where?)
• Training (Can roles and their enablement be defined?)
• Auditing (What action outcomes and timing should be tracked?)
About the author
Malcolm Ryder served as a Senior
Software Architect with the
Solutions
Engineering unit in the Enterprise
Solutions and Technology Group at
CA Technologies.
Since 2006, Malcolm has worked
both directly with customers and
internally with product
management and CA
Services to specify requirements
and to strategically align and
implement solution components
and products in the CA portfolio of
ITSM offerings. His recent focus
has been in Service Portfolio
Management and solution
integrations architecture.
Prior to joining CA Technologies
in solutions architecture, he co-
designed multiple market-leading
ITSM applications for various
vendors as a product strategist or as
an executive, in product
management, customer services
and operational performance. His
prior experience also includes over
15 years in management consulting
including marketing, asset
management and IT Value
Management in both the public and
private sectors. He co-designed the
industry’s first Windows-based
commercial ITSM automation

2. Each of the three focus areas requires policy and technology underpinnings that
predispose the manageability of social networking.
Management concerns include the following:
• What is the business risk of a management failure?
• Should social networking replace older methods or enhance them?
• How should the company manage the relentless innovation of social
networking coming into the company from the outside?
Managed adoption and alignment subjects each of the key focus areas to all of
the following requirements:
• Policy
• Communicate the business priorities for communication and use of
knowledge.
• Articulate preferential support for using the various respective social
networking techniques accordingly.
• Incentivize adoption of policies through organizational change management
(self-organizing becomes selfmanaging).
• Technology
• Define and defend the "boundary" of the corporate social community
(communities).
• Equip community members with self-optimizing tools.
• Encourage innovative usages that strengthen alignment to policy.
Placing these requirements on the focus areas creates a framework for modeling
the initial management efforts. The modeling can point at existing management
efforts, and it can point out areas for new management effort. Therefore, no
single set of particular management efforts is “correct” for all organizations.
However, the following illustration is a management plan suggesting useful
touch-points that any organization should consider:
Planning the Flow of Social Information
Policy Scale Training Auditing
solution and later, at another
company, the first ITIL-certified
commercial ITSM automation
suite.
Communicate the business priorities for
communication and use of knowledge.
Workgroup size Roles and stakeholders Content usage
Articulate preferential support for using
the various respective social networking
techniques accordingly
Access privileges Demos Subscribers
Incentivize adoption of policies through
organizational change management
(self-organizing becomes self-
managing)
Projects Employee
recognition/status
Performance

3. Technology Scale Training Auditing
Planners must remember that coordinating across the touch points is the
approach required to gain sustainable effectiveness. This coordination creates
the circumstances for the social networking to generate value from its
information flows.
This article provides a survey of factors that underlie the challenges and
strategy for bringing social networking under the umbrella of business
knowledge management.
The Big Picture
The Origins and Value of Knowledge
Social networking raises the following key questions:
• Within the new type of information overload that it generates, how do we
efficiently and continuously exercise selectivity for serving the needs of the
business?
• How do we capture value from the supply of content?
“Value” is itself an idea that needs a precise practical definition. Value is
always generated from a distinction. The distinction presents a characteristic
that affects the reasoning behind making a choice: choosing or not choosing
Define and defend the "boundary" of the
corporate social community
(communities)
Support Programs Programs
Equip community members with self-
optimizing tools
Services Service Procurement
Encourage innovative usages that
strengthen alignment to policy
Projects Evangelists Projects

4. the item that carries the distinction. If the distinction does not affect this
reasoning, it is typically not perceived as a “meaningful” difference. The idea
of value rests in the sense that a distinction is meaningful. Things become
meaningful because they are experienced in a given context. Where
knowledge is our objective, expertise is the most desirable manifestation of
experience. But all expertise is predicated on identifying a context.
This means that to capture value from the information supply, we must
understand how context works.
Context
Choice is fundamental to all practical notions of value. Context adds two
important ingredients to the reasoning behind choices:
• Comparative data
“Value” is itself an idea that
needs a precise practical
definition.
• Points of view
Comparative data presents potentially important alternatives to whatever is
offered. For example, the alternatives may be contradictory, extenuating, or
even amplifying. This additional data comes from experiences including
history, research, and coincidental exposure to other communications.
Typically, comparative data helps to establish perspective. The “perspective”
is the set of possible observations made available by a point of view, which is
a particular position from which an observation is made. Comparative data
helps to determine what point of view is most useful.
In turn, the point of view acts as a filter on the data that is used in reasoning.
As an analogy, think of a photograph as a set of processed information
generated from a fixed point of view. Choosing a type of lens, aiming it, and
focusing it create the context for the capture of information by the camera.
The resulting picture is contextualized information, which we experience as
the photographer’s choice.
Because context creates distinctions or differences, it can always generate
some value. In fact, context readily affects at least four important variables
that affect our sense of value:
• Expectations
• Decisions
• Actions
• Concepts
Any given context can simultaneously affect one or more of these four
variables. Even more interesting, and more complicated to sort out: these four
variables may serve as context for each other.
The abundance and complication of information is one of the main side
effects of the “organic” behavior of social networking, in which many
disparate variables are readily connected or superimposed, intentionally or
otherwise. Because of the resulting complexities, we call on experts to sort
through variables and rescue items that are needed or most desired.
Due to previous experience or
current needs, we designate
certain topics of information as
having more value or less value
by default. That is, “less
valuable” topics are ones that
have been experienced as not
being very meaningful to the
occasions and parties in action,
while more valuable topics have
been experienced as more
meaningful. A business point of
view dictates that some
information is more important
than others. The business
management of the information is
aimed at establishing perspectives
that promote and preserve
business expertise.
Subject matter expertise, as a
perspective, has the special
distinction of containing a
cumulative familiarity with the
full span of lesser and greater
value within a certain range of
topics. “Experts” can identify
what kind of value currently
exists (or should exist) in
association with any of the topics
within scope. Subject Matter
Experts (SMEs) have knowledge
but also a familiarity with the
contextual interrelationships that

5. surround the processing of a given topic’s information.
With social networking, this broad coverage and assessment capability,
which sorts through the complexity of the information supply, is often sought
in the “wisdom of the crowd.” However, confidence in the crowd presumes
that the The abundance and complication of information is one of the main
side effects of the “organic” behavior of social networking, in which many
disparate variables are readily connected or superimposed, intentionally or
otherwise.
crowd interactions, its dynamics that circulate and change information, are
managing the changes that occur and persist. For supervisory managers, this
raises questions about how crowds are forming and which changes are
prevailing.
Communication
The main force at work in change is communication. By driving
discovery, transmission, and interpretation of information, communication
modifies the existing combinations of contexts and information. This
presents a variety of scenarios to place under management. For example:
• What if new contexts are applied to older topics?
• How can new topics gain value in older contexts?
• Where do new topics and contexts materialize?
Ordinarily, the combining of contexts and information follows some regular
patterns of formation and dissolution. And, certain combinations are
promoted more than others. We know these “promotions” by various names.
Three of the most prominent modes of promoting the association of
information and contexts are:
• Logic
• Culture • Politics
Each of these three modes actively “markets” information of certain types in
certain ways.
Savvy management accommodates all three successfully; what is most
interesting now is that all three modes can be affected, potentially
dramatically, by social networks.
Content versus Knowledge
In social networking, the production and marketing of information generates
enormous quantities of content. Because of that content availability, we need
to reassess the definition of knowledge.
In a classical model, you have hierarchical development of an output called
knowledge:
• Data is related to each other and to a situation to form information.
• Information is related to some method of practice to form knowledge.
Usually, the close tie to methods then makes knowledge very marketable
within a sphere of operations called a “domain,” and subject matter experts
gather within and around the domain. Collectively, the gathered group
continually tries to use, improve, or dispose of knowledge that is in a
repository provided for the domain. Existing knowledge can acquire or lose
value, as well as gain or lose
holders. Meanwhile, new
knowledge may be drawn into the
repository.
Management looks at applying
some control to the repository of
identified knowledge. However,
because all knowledge is
malleable and perishable, the
more important arena of
management is production –
attending to the mechanism
chosen for creating and
promoting the relationships
between data and situations, and
the relationships between
information and practices. These
two mechanisms underpin the
process that concludes with
acceptance of
The main force at work in change
is communication.

6. Because all knowledge is malleable and perishable, the more important arena
of management is production
proposed knowledge by the target users.
Acceptance comes in different flavors. Proven mechanisms are oriented towards the following prominent types of
acceptance. The bond between information and practices (work) can be created and promoted by any of the three:
Organic or tribal
• Validates using cultural terms
• Relies on consensus
Institutional or technical
• Validates using policy terms
• Relies on mandates
Conventional or algorithmic
• Validates using formulas
• Relies on models
We want to see how these mechanisms matter with regards to expectations, decisions, actions, and concepts.
A simplified view of their interconnections shows interesting alignments across a “universe” of identified knowledge:
Organic or Tribal Institutional or
Conventional or
In that same view, we see a rough correspondence to three types of thinking:
• Habitual (organic or tribal)
• Practical (institutional or technical)
• Managerial (conventional or algorithmic)
This observation raises traditional management questions about what type of thinking we want, under what given
circumstances, and how we can assure that we get it.
Knowledge Validation and Change
To promote or enforce our desire to cultivate given ways of thinking, two aspects are involved:
• Knowledge validation
• Change management
We explicitly distinguish and apply modes of validation, because when there is no authoritative source of validation,
content proposed as knowledge is often just not accepted as being “knowledge.” Authoritative validation of
knowledge is the most overt indication of the intent to market practical knowledge. Because of its popularity, social
networking brings a new balance of power to the formation and marketing of knowledge. Social Thinking
Technical Algorithmic
Expectations Customs Standards Rules
Decisions Beliefs Methods Priorities
Actions Rituals Techniques Procedures
Concepts Stories Conditions Proofs

7. Concurrent with the rise of social networking, several catchy ideas about authoritative validation have achieved
notoriety under new names, as if they were spawned by social networking itself. Yet these ideas mainly reflect the
different basic
modes of acceptance previously charted in this article:
• “We are smarter than Me” (approximately tribal)
• “Communities of Interest” (approximately technical)
• “Viral” network effects (approximately algorithmic)
We have seen that social networking gives an individual an unprecedented
capacity to simultaneously leverage all three modes. However, it can also
exaggerate or confuse their differences:
• Within any mode of acceptance, the volume and repetition of certain
information can help stabilize adoption of a set of knowledge, but it can
also induce myopia. Repetition gives the appearance of prior acceptance,
suggesting that evaluation need not be redone. As a side effect,
alternatives may not be considered.
• Uninhibited circulation of information across the modes of acceptance
can broaden perspectives, but it can also foster contradictions and
ambiguous accountability that erodes the information’s credibility.
Information recipients may assume that without checking the sources,
whatever they are provided already has validity or that it cannot be valid,
making any conflicting information hard to interpret.
• Finally, since each mode represents a different type of thinking, the free
blending of their perspectives carries the risk of becoming irrational.
Imagine using mythical information as the basis of a logical argument to
enforce a policy.
Consequently, when exploiting social networking’s energy and openness,
businesses must be wary of unintended side effects.
For example, most educational and training programs presume a successful
progression from tribal knowledge (which may even be irrelevant and
counterproductive) to managerial knowledge (where compliance to goals and
objectivity is self-regulating). The progression can be initially more difficult
when you find more entrenchment in one of the types of knowledge than in
others, making knowledge holders of that type more resistant to change. An
unyielding perspective can block new data and information, preventing
important formation of new knowledge before its meaning can be
demonstrated.
On the other hand, social networking requires the business to manage
“openness” itself. To programmatically incorporate knowledge in a
population of its users and producers, authorized validation of knowledge
must be accompanied by authorized change of knowledge.
Knowledge Flows
Authoritative validation of
knowledge precedes serious
marketing of knowledge, but
communication is how knowledge
itself is formed. This means
communication is also the basis of
knowledge change.
Social networking offers and
displays communications that, to an
unprecedented degree, expose the
scale and speed of potential change.
Communications activity includes:
• Discovery (for example, search
and alert). Discovery includes
the appearance of new
knowledge and, increasingly, of
new producers and users.
Within any mode of acceptance, the
volume and repetition of certain
information can help stabilize
adoption of a set of knowledge, but
it can also induce myopia.

8. Social networking requires the business to manage “openness” itself.
• Transmission (for example, sharing). Transmission includes post-
validation knowledge sent to targeted users, but increasingly it includes
pre-validated knowledge sent to untargeted users.
• Interpretation (for example, application and re-purposing). Interpretation
includes anticipated and tracked contexts, but increasingly it includes
unexpected contexts that surface yet go untracked despite their ability to
exert influence.
As a result of social networking technologies being adopted, conventional
supervisory management presence is outgunned. Management is now far
exceeded by the amount of energy expended by a population on interactions
with each other and between the elements of communications.
“Open” social networks intentionally emphasize the visibility of this activity
among network users. As the effects and products of the interactions grow in
persistence or in volume, they begin to influence users’ expectations about
what is possible and what is valuable. This influence in turn encourages
changes in what is formed and provided. In somewhat Darwinian fashion, the
visible accumulation of results appears to be what is “naturally” supported in
the environment.
Managers need to do little to keep that going. However, much of that
interaction and influence risks becoming unpredictable or disengaged from
business priorities.
In such circumstances, to apply authority to emergent changes:
• The infrastructures of communications should be managed to overtly
support preferred communications methods and overtly discourage
others.
• Some knowledge should be actively sponsored and marketed to users; the
marketing should generate benefits for the recipients of the marketing
itself; recipients should realize that they obtain the benefits directly from
the knowledge sponsor.
• Managing demand for knowledge should leverage the energy already
being expended on knowledge discovery by directing it to well-organized
fulfillment services.
Infrastructure Knowledge Demand
Moves towards managing change
must not aim for making things
static or closed. The overall goal of
establishing this authoritative
presence is to create channels of
knowledge, not repositories of
knowledge. A change agent for
knowledge, fostering the channel,
will be the role that is recognized as
most authoritative of knowledge
changes. The responsibility that
comes with the authority is to carry
on a relationship with users. The
primary characteristic supporting
that authority is the knowledge
community’s confidence in the
As a result of social networking
technologies being adopted,
conventional supervisory
management presence is outgunned.
Support Marketing and
Sponsorship
Management and
Services
Discovery Search engines Projects End user Support
Transmission Applications Publishing Catalogs
Interpretation Knowledge
bases
Education Events

9. Moves towards managing change must not aim for making things static or
closed. The overall goal of establishing this authoritative presence is to
create channels of knowledge, not repositories of knowledge.
channel. A change agent may be a manager, an architect, an analyst, or another skilled person (or team) that can
establish, coordinate, and maintain the support, sponsorship, and services as a program that develops the channels.
Knowledge Channels
Traditionally, knowledge management has focused on how to standardize the population-wide distribution of
knowledge “assets” or knowledge “resources” conforming to some certain ontology. It has been accepted that SMEs
are human resources representing intellectual “capital,” and most of the responsibility has been given to SMEs to
collaborate with “knowledge engineers” and publishers to capture, store, and forward that capital. Publishing has been
the main paradigm of re-use.
Social networking changes the strategy. The new strategy uses discovery, transmission, and interpretation differently.
Common shared interpretations within a community are still a high priority, but the conventional transmission of
standardized knowledge is replaced by providing focused, on-demand access to discoverable resources that are already
distributed throughout the network. As a result, knowledge publishing is in some respects being supplanted by
knowledge mining, and the competencies for the mining are orchestrated into the process of providing channels.
Within the channel assembly, semantics, filtering, presentation, and indexing are vital mining techniques implemented
in systematic processing. Those techniques have parallel functions in the roles, assignments, products, and affiliations
of individual social networkers.
Channel Characteristics Social Network User Attributes Social Network Information Tools
Together, the users and information processing are accountable to managers as the sources of the networking outputs
that can be discovered, transmitted, and interpreted as knowledge.
Social networking complicates matters. Although an individual person may have a predesignated position within the
organization defined outside of the social network, within a social network, the person is far less predictably active on
(processing by people) (processing by systems)
Perspectives & standardized
meanings
Roles Semantics
Selections & situational relevance Assignments Filtering
Deliverables & usage formats Products Presentation
Relationships Affiliations Indexing

10. the basis of that presdesignation. One of the main attractive attributes of social networking – inclusiveness – is also
what makes the collective individual actions more likely to add, in unplanned ways, to the diversity of information
contributions and their uses within the network. Part of the purpose of the channel design is to promote preferences
held by managers, but to do so in a way that is not unnecessarily exclusive.
Channel Quality
Operationally, the goal for a knowledge “channel” derived from a social network is to replace the “library” and to
stand as a virtual SME. This includes a willingness to shift management perspective from asset management to
process management of how expertise is delivered.
A channel thrives on the continuing input and changes of its supply of packaged information or “content,” and for the
knowledge channel, this means that strong or high-speed vetting of the content is a critical success factor. The
formation of knowledge is powered by associating information and practices, and vetting analyzes the probability that
contributed information is meaningful in the context of a practice. Higher probabilities are taken to represent “better”
or more valuable knowledge.
Individual persons, including managers, agents, and consumers, can figure strongly in this scheme in two
ways: • Originating the information as a first source
• Orchestrating its valuable associations with practices by announcing, demonstrating, or proposing an
association In social networks, machines can also perform those tasks. Personal contributors of information are
accompanied by, but possibly competing with, other people and automated systems that affect what information is
provided as knowledge. Competition does not mean that the channel is not “open.” The primary goal of the analysis
in vetting is to develop business intelligence about the dynamics and content generated in the social network’s user
communities, so as to determine what to cultivate and what to handle differently. Patterns, trends, or even instances
of success can be weighed for their sustainability and repeatability. Emergent successes can include ontologies,
validations, and preferences derived from the contributed information. The findings can then be used to help
contributors direct their ongoing contributions to places where they are most likely to be found valuable. This
direction encourages the continued engagement of users.
Tracking the results of those activities in the population can confirm the business’s intended effects. It can also expose
unintended effects that prove to have just as much influence, good and bad. These findings help to manage, not just
observe, the evolution of the knowledge in real-time. In turn, that supports efforts to progress the knowledge from
tribal to managerial status, which equates with “learning” in the community.
Channeling knowledge is an approach that provides a scope, within which to set management expectations including
defining, planning, observing, and determining successes. In a social network environment, management matures from
awareness of the initial state to continuous improvement, as shown in the following illustration:
Social Information Processing for Business
The manageability of social networking
Business alignment
One of the most interesting characteristics of a social network, along with its energy and openness, is its innate
capacity to expand. We have seen that rapidly expanding social networks may also readily accommodate a significant
transformation of its user communities and their goals. However, by hosting a channel strategy for knowledge
production and use, social networking acquires a specified business responsibility, which raises concerns about
establishing reliance on the social network and its continuity:
• What methods should be used to manage the social network?
• Should social networking replace older methods or enhance them?

11. • How should the company manage the relentless innovation of social networking coming into the company from
the outside?
Given those issues, the requirements are to select sustainable operational techniques, including new or modified ones,
and to configure the network’s presence appropriately for the business responsibility. This effort should be framed by
three key issues: scale, training, and auditing:
Scale Training Auditing
Work Environment
Another important management view is of a channel as an environment. Said differently, a channel is a location of
events, such as presentations, and a location within which people can convene and interact. Social networks promote
the establishment of such places, and by offering users particular tools, they also establish the nature of activity that
occurs there. These proactive effects are planning factors in the adoption and adaptation of social networking as a
work environment.
An enterprise environment classically has three dimensions: people, processes, and technologies. Social networking
has challenges to overcome in each dimension.
People factors:
Failure to manage knowledge is less likely within small workgroups. Here, the threat of social networking is the
size of the at-large community that it may generate. The business does not really need a huge community; it really
needs a predictably right-sized community to engage on a timely basis. The social network can readily promote or
create an event for a targeted group.
Process factors:
Often, the single most expensive phenomenon in operations is the cost spent on consuming available time
effectively. Social behavior should be recruited and subscribed with the objective of productivity. Because social
networking generates a lot of momentum on its own, this may mean redesigning work procedures to leverage the most
probable behaviors that are fostered already by social networking. Technology factors:
Collaboration tools are the mainstay of socially oriented knowledge production. Where they succeed, it is more
because they provide a “commons” for shared visibility, support, and utility than because of improving interactions.
Social networks can alter people’s preferences of where they gather to interact. A business investment in achieving a
critical mass of adoption of a commons should be weighed in terms of existing commons and the effect of adding
new ones or migrating to them. Production Requirements
A final and equally important managerial view is the operational close-up on how content is created or provided in the
social channel. Social networking’s power is that it offers new ways of making things. Despite social networking’s
advantage of generating a vast diversity of content, the management goal is to convert data to information to
knowledge in the channel, in forms that the business can assign or predict. This group of assignable and predictable
Mitigate business risk
of failure
Conduct periodic
subjectoriented short-term
campaigns
Select a tolerated existing
constraint for solving with a
new approach
Assess results specifically for
lessons learned
Replace or enhance
legacy methods
Emphasize affordable means
of mining knowledge
Pilot certain focus areas of
knowledge to modify
Weigh actual demonstrated
capacity of new method to take
over legacy functions
Absorb social
networking innovations
Adhere to change agency,
and focus on widening the
knowledge scope with the
innovation, not on
networking
methods
Proactively guide people to
opportunities for using
innovations in a supervised
business task
Report on how new behaviors
relate to the incumbent
evaluations of performance

12. aspects emphasizes the most critical issue in knowledge management, which is the requirements to be met through
proactively producing content, instead of by reactively cataloging content supply. These requirements, all part of the
packaging of information, fall into three groups:
Sources (discoverable and identifiable)
• messaging
• searching
Responsibility (communicable and traceable)
• acceptance criteria
• timing
Credibility/validation (measurable and repeatable)
• certification
• correlation
The Manageability of Socially Developed Knowledge
Today's enterprise increasingly relies on managing its knowledge assets and knowledge resources to optimize the
relevance, quality, and impact of the work it performs. Because social networking enables users to dramatically
increase the supply of content, managing knowledge development is at the core of its subsequent manageability as a
resource.
These development issues extend across the matters of interpretation, transmission, and discovery.
Tools
Because so much of social networking is new and different in the enterprise,
it is challenging to understand how its rich array of features and functions
should be handled to optimize their possible benefits. For example, social
networking tools try to “front-end” most communications functionality, and
for users, this is exciting and convenient, which encourages usage to
originate and orchestrate information. For business purposes, much of what is
needed to follow up and understand that initial production of information can
run behind the scenes with better consistency and efficiency– no user
interface required. The reason to rely on the front end or the back end is to
improve the business’s work; simplifying or even reducing choices on the
user’s front end can have clear and measurable benefit by increasing
consistency and decreasing learning curves for production. For knowledge
management, automated systems behind the user interface then improve the
ability to leverage social networking behaviors for business.
Performance
Knowledge should affect certain characteristics of work in consistent ways
regardless of what work is being done:
• Relevance: aligning decisions to known priorities
• Quality: guiding effort away from real-time errors
• Impact: identifying the most important, as well as additional, contexts of
the work
Improving these characteristics improves the performance level of work, and
high-performance work fosters business value. Proactive use of knowledge is
the key to performance, but in knowledge management, a key problem is to
further determine what important things are not already parts of the
commonly accessed or validated knowledge being used. Communication is
the primary means of tackling that problem, which is where social
networking enters as a challenge and an aid. Social networking produces and
exposes a huge amount of this
additional material, which then
needs to be harnessed for
performance. In this networking,
social behaviors are the
communications driver that finds
information relevant to practices in
time for tasks, thus generating and
delivering knowledge. The range
and types of behaviors supported
will precondition how effectively
communications can enhance this
knowledge provision.
Harnessing diversity
In a social network, the default
condition is that knowledge
development is distributed whether
intended or not. Accepting this as a
starting point, management should
determine when to leverage the
condition proactively versus when to
reactively do so.
In proactive and reactive scenarios,
this diversity includes multiple
ways of communicating about the
same subject, as well as a wide
range of interest levels across
many different subjects. That
brings the technical challenge of
interpreting available

13. communications to categorize it by value. For knowledge capture, include
solicited and unsolicited communications. At point of capture, the key is to
identify the ways that information is used when offered and to evaluate the
impact those ways have on supporting business objectives. Since
communication occurs in many different locations, identification and
Because so much of social networking is new and different in the enterprise,
it is challenging to understand how its rich array of features and functions
should be handled to optimize their possible benefits.
At point of capture, the key is to identify the ways that information is used
when offered and to evaluate the impact those ways have on supporting
business objectives. evaluation are constrained by the ways that
communications are discovered. To
address this constraint, the enterprise
should adopt the following tactics:
• Encourage the communicators at
those locations to voluntarily
propose the knowledge value of
what they are saying and using.
• Host communications through a
central portal, where some
monitoring and prescribed
analysis has been activated
before the communication
occurs.
• Record the communications
occurring at various locations
and analyze them
retrospectively.
Social networking typically offers
all three of those tactics, but it is still
important to determine the propriety
and efficacy of each.
• Can communications and usage
descriptions be easily requested
and obtained in a standardized
way from disparate and less
controlled locations? What
about remote and non-business
locations, as well as local or
business locations? If responses
are not obtained predictably,
why would they be reliable?
• Does it make sense to focus on
unsolicited information in
centrally monitored locations?
What kind of value might be
obtained above and beyond the
prescribed communications
already in place without social
networking?
• With recorded communications,
what kind of analysis can cost-
effectively achieve a high
signal-to-noise ratio? Will it
encourage or discourage
communicators to remain
voluntary?
When considering different tactics
for different kinds of information,
answers to these questions become

14. the design basis for configuring social networking’s knowledge development.
They set management expectations about how selective communications can
provide information to be fed into enhancing the relevance, quality, or impact
of work. As such, they provide an important basis for planning cooperation.
Conclusion
Social networking is a relatively new force in the enterprise. Unlike many
business innovations, it is not one that the business originated and is
incrementally maturing. Instead, social networking is a naturally self-
directing mode of activity that, in a business, requires adoption and
adaptation. Its dynamics affect the way that information is produced and
discovered, thus affecting how the topical relevance of information to the
business is actually recognized and used. Its influence is more behavioral
than technical, which impacts how the information can be managed as
knowledge.
Social networking brings forces to work that can readily change the
conditions in which meaning is generated. Through enriched automated
communications, networked social behavior promotes rapid ad hoc exchange
of new information as well as broadened access to older information. As a
result, it creates new contexts of interpretation as well as inhabiting and
propagating existing ones. By fostering many new possible combinations of
information and context, the actual current range of types and usability of
knowledge is established and expanded. These include cases: • new
contexts are applied to older topics • new topics gain value in older
contexts
• new topics and contexts materialize.
When considering different tactics for different kinds of information, answers
to these questions become the design basis for configuring social
networking’s knowledge development.
The business needs to “get out in front of this” for social networking to be
productive instead of counterproductive. To give socially generated
information a practical place in required work, businesses must integrate
knowledge and operations. This integration means that social networking
should be planned, configured, and tested:
• Since social networking generates content on its own in many ways, the
business should select which aspects of social networking will be
advised, supported, and cultivated. The business should declare
objectives that provide a rationale for selecting different social
networking opportunities and effects.
• Selection involves detecting and prioritizing potential risks and benefits
from numerous perspectives. It does not make sense to make selections
that operationally are not sustainable by support or not attractive to users.
• Users need to be attracted to
working on business topics
while they are doing social
networking, and they need to be
rewarded for doing so.
• Piloting these decisions provides
the right chance of gaining
feedback as guidance for next
steps, and over time, the follow-
up adaptations of social
networking in the business will
more often than not come to
drive business progress forward.
While social networking will itself
continue to rapidly morph across
many technologies, the business can
take repeatable steps, such as those
previously surveyed, to establish a
stable framework of purposefulness.
This purposefulness then directs and
even predicts the ability of the
business to systematically adopt the
ongoing changes brought by social
networking, in a timely way.
NOTICES
While social networking will itself
continue to rapidly morph across
many technologies, the business can
take repeatable steps to establish a
stable framework of purposefulness.
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