Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness

Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness
Inquiry and learning into social networks, organizational network analysis, and the relationships among people and systems in complex organizations and networks.

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Networks and Governance

Governance is a word with many fine distinctions. Most definitions use terms like power, authority, decision-rights, policy, management, control. Governance is applied to political entities, corporate institutions, increasingly, IT.

While writing Net Work, I chose to define governance from the perspective of the word's root, which means "steering:" "Governance is the fine art and delicate practice of guiding and steering an organization in a steady operational state." Many of us in the network biz will avow that you cannot manage networks, you can only steward them, but I also believe that governance, as a practice, provides insights into how to define an initial structure and to let it evolve within certain boundaries. It may all be about managing boundaries.

What got me to thinking about governance was a note from colleague Laurie Lock Lee that he has started a new blog, Governance in a Networked World. His initial posts indicate that he will be focusing on issues of governance in our increasingly networked world of business, such as a recent post describing the issues related to scaling supply chain management when dealing with ever-increasing numbers of suppliers.

Not to overlook the political aspect of governance, I've been a fan of David Lazer for some time. David is the Director of the Program on Networked Governance at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. David hosts seminars on complexity and social networks at the KSG, which have been a great resource for us lucky Boston area locals.

IT governance is another beast all together, but I can bet you that Web 2.0 is making the control freaks crazy.

Anyway, welcome (back) to the blogosphere, Laurie. I look forward to your conversations.

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Monday, April 21, 2008

Community 2.0 Webinar on Thursday, April 24

Community 2.0 is right around the corner. I'm going to preview my keynote talk there this Thursday afternoon at 3:00pm. You can register for this Free Webinar and afterwards, send me feedback!

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Wednesday, April 09, 2008

A networking week that was

Since last week, I've met up with Jack Vinson (who has taken a job in the Boston area and is in the process of moving his family here) from my "greater KM network;" got first time face-to-face connections with John Smith, Bronwyn Stuckey, and Beth Kanter from my CPsquare network; reconnected with colleagues from the UVA Network Roundtable I've co-authored articles with (Zeke Wolfberg at the DIA and Vic Gulas of MWH Global); got to spend an hour with the elusive Bruce Hoppe; and had a wonderful morning introducing a small local OD network introduced to me by Nancy Settle-Murphy about Web 2.0. I missed, however, a great meeting of the Boston KM forum (one of my principal local networks) on Web2.0 because I was working under a deadline for an article for a print magazine (how 20th century) on organizational network analysis. Today (also 20th century) I got a copy of the new book, Knowledge Management in Practice, that includes a chapter co-authored by my partner Joe Hutchinson and myself, but that also includes chapters by Boston KM Forum colleagues Larry Chait and Lynda Moulton and by two folks I saw last fall at a Conference Board of Canada KM event, Dave Pollard and Albert Simard.

These activities all brought home to me very powerfully how much Web 2.0 tools have crept into my life and work. I know when Jack is in town because we are fellow travelers on Dopplr. John and I have conversed many times over the course of the 5-year history of CPsquare, and I've interacted (only slightly) in the virtual collaboration spaces with Beth and Bronwyn. CPsquare and its practitioner community are on the cutting edge of technologies to support communities. Beth introduced us to her latest method for communicating, her N95, which she used to telecast (live) brief interviews with all of us at dinner. She also posted a photo of my with my book on Flickr, to help generate sales. Communicating in real time.

One of the attractions at the Boston KM forum that I missed was hearing Ray Sims and Jessica Lipnack talk about their Web 2.0 journeys into the "flow." Especially as I still have much to learn, even though my session with Nancy's LDR group of OD consultants was quite a success. For people who haven't yet gone beyond LinkedIn or perhaps put up Facebook pages or possibly thought about blogging, the world running underneath, the social bookmarks, twittering, and I'm not sure what all else, is really an astonishment.

Thus it was that I found it difficult to wrap up my article for Inside Knowledge magazine on "Social Network Analysis Five Years On." My first published article about SNA/ONA was in that same magazine in May of 2003. To bring the field up to date, I used all my social tools to reconnect with people, and to make new connections. Work in the field has progressed, but is moving quickly as the tools that we use to determine relationships between people and create maps of them are rapidly being embedded into the social tools that we use. The careful methodology of ONA will remain valuable, as it looks at the explicitly declared relationships among people at the level of "who do you turn to when you have a new idea that you want to share?" But the amazing amount of implicit knowledge that we will be able to mine to look at the relationships will alter the way companies think about networks forever. (I invite you to look at my blog post on TheAppGap on this topic.)

Yours truly (swirling in the flow).

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Saturday, April 05, 2008

Social networks and social networking

I've been doing social network analysis since 2001. With the upswing over the past few years of the social networking sites the language has got a bit blurry. When I do my NetWork workshops, I now need to help people distinguish the basics of "social networks" as distinct from the phenomenon of linking.

Mike Gotta, in his Collaborative Thinking blog (which I started reading just a short time ago), provides a great service by summarizing notes on the history of social network analysis. (The notes are taken from a book by Linton Freeman.) Notes include snippets of the contributions to the field, beginning with Auguste Comte in 1853 along with a summary of the key learnings from the research over the years.

He summarizes Comte's contribution: "Comte applied structural terms to argue that people within a social system are interconnected, a concept core to much of the research that emerged in the 1930�s concerning social networks." This notion of the structure underneath networks is one of the core principles I use in my book to help people learn to use the network lens.

My friend Jessica also blogged about Mike's post, and I love her insertion of a quote from Alexis deTocqueville about Americans and our way of forming associations. I read that this morning just after an email from my own small Town's emerging group of activists concerned about the future of our schools. I've been thinking about doing some maps.

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Friday, April 04, 2008

Resonance

The power of blogs to connect has resonated with me today as I looked at my Bloglines feed and found a number of touching remembrances of Dr. Martin Luther King, on this anniversary of his death:

The Night James Brown Saved Boston (Karl Hakkarainen)
Le Roi est mort (Jessica Lipnack)
Why (The King of Love is Dead) by Nina Simone (Stowe Boyd)

Thanks, friends, for reminding me.

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Saturday, March 22, 2008

Explaining Collective Intelligence - Haiku may be the only way to go

I've been pondering a recent McAfee post, "Explaining my Fondness for Explicit Content" and have blogged on this in TheAppGap, but I was so tickled by his references to definitions by Kim Rachmeler on the topic of "collective intelligence:

The network knows what the nodes do not
The nodes know nothing. The nodes know all. Both are true.

These resonated with me partly because my view of the three eras of knowledge management (I will not use the vogue-ish 1.0, 2.0 terminology), I say that:

in the first era, knowledge was considered to be in documents (artifacts)
in the second era, it was acknowledged that knowledge is in people
in this third era, knowledge is in the network

Kim' statements above are a much more elegant and thought-provoking way of stating the third.

Meanwhile, Nancy White has posted on Haiku as Conference Capture one of the Haikus blogged by praxis101 at the recent SXSW:

Your social footprint.
Or your ghost on the network.
You have to choose one

If you go and read the McAfee article referenced above, you'll see that he makes the distinction between the explicit content (what we know we've written, tagged or linked) and the implicit content on the web, which he describes as "fingerprints." There must be a haiku there somewhere.

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Now available!

Net Work: A Practical Guide to Creating and Sustaining Networks at Work and in the World

patti anklam. How to make networks work.

Find me person-to-person !

Community 2.0, May 12- 14, 2008, Las Vegas, NV, Keynote address "Networking to Net Work"
Special Libraries Association (SLA), June 13-15, Seattle, WA Workshop in Mapping Social Networks

links: network analysis

My ONA Page

Rob Cross
Bruce Hoppe
Valdis Krebs
INSNA
ONA-prac. The online community for learners and practitioners in the emerging field of Organizational Network Analysis.

links: blogroll

21st Century Organization
Anecdote
Bill Ives
Dave Snowden
David Gurteen
Denham Grey
Jack Vinson
Lilia Efimova
Patrick Lambe
Ross Dawson
Stowe Boyd
SelectMarie