Valdis Krebs wrote to point out that the industry map I linked to is just a demo, and that he provides more robust visualizations to his clients. In a fascinating paper called Managing the Connected Organization , he writes about the application of social network analysis to corporate culture. Elsewhere, he describes a method for identifying subject-matter experts based on email queries. Writes Krebs:
An organization's data is found in its computer systems, but a company's intelligence is found in its biological and social systems. Computer networks must support the people networks in today's fluid and adaptive organizations -- not the other way around. [ Knowledge Networks - Mapping and Measuring Knowledge Creation and Re-Use]
Blogging, both within and across enterprise borders, reconfigures networks to fit social models. In so doing, it spontaneously creates "APIs" -- access logs, referrer logs -- that will greatly amplify the power and utility of the techniques Krebs describes.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/04/30.html#a210