SRI Report: Social Media for Enterprise Learning

LoDLearning on Demand

© 2004 by SRI Consulting Business Intelligence. All rights reserved.

First Quarter 2004Eilif Trondsen; e-mail: [email protected] and Alex Gault([email protected])

Contributors: Tom Hill, Marcelo Hoffmann, Thomas M. McKenna

Bulletin

Learning Implications of Social-NetworkingTechnology and Services

Some people who oppose eLearning worry that eLearning may be too technologyfocused and may leave insufficient room for the social element of learning—theperson-to-person interaction and communication. This concern exists despiteevidence that a learner who spends an hour or two in an intense, interactivesimulation can have a far more productive and enjoyable experience than one whosits in a large lecture hall listening to a teacher’s monologue (which is still thepredominant way of teaching in most universities and colleges around the world).Nevertheless, social interaction, dialogue, and discussion with others can beimportant ways of creating rich and satisfying learning experiences for mostlearners. Thus, some of the new tools, technologies, and services that help buildsocial networks and enable and support social interaction can complementeLearning programs and improve learning effectiveness.

In the past few years, especially during 2003, a number of companies haveemerged that offer social-networking services and technologies, and these playershave generated considerable interest in the popular press as well as in the venture-capitalist industry. Another category of companies that contribute to socialnetworking—by identifying and locating experts (and thus facilitating personalcontacts and network building)—focuses on so-called expertise-locator systems(see Figure 1). This LoD Bulletin examines how these companies and theirtechnologies may affect learning.

All companies and technologies that enable or strengthen personalrelationships and networks (so-called social-networking companies, or SNCs) candirectly or indirectly influence learning—by providing easier access to knowledgeresources, for instance—but this Bulletin focuses on business-related learningenvironments. Companies like Friendster, which has had considerable success inhelping people find dates through friends of friends, are therefore of less interest tous than those that target companies, government agencies, universities, alumniorganizations, and other organizations.

© 2004 by SRI Consulting Business Intelligence, LoD Bulletin 2

Figure 1SELECTED SOCIAL-NETWORKING AND ENTERPRISE-LOCATOR COMPANIES

The latter type of SNC can affect learning in the following ways:

• By identifying experts and mapping enterprise-network dynamics. Companies that focus onbusiness networking or provide expertise-location technologies can contribute to knowledgediscovery in organizations. Clearly, organizations could operate more effectively and efficientlyif they knew what they know: Most large organizations have great difficulty finding the rightpeople, data, or documents when they need them. Thus, some vendors now offer tools andtechnologies for mapping communication flows within organizations and for determining whatroles people play (see the box on page 3 for a brief discussion of network analysis).

Enterprise-RelationshipManagement

• Spoke (www.spoke.com)

• Visible Path(www.visiblepath.com)

• Interface(www.interface.com)

Gaming

• Xfire (www.xfire.com)

Media Sharing

• Flickr (www.flickr.com)

• Wallop(http://mywallop.com)*

Expertise-Locator and -ManagementSystems

• Tacit (www.tacit.com)

• Kamoon (www.kamoon.com)

• AskMe (www.askme.com)

• Xpert Universe(http://corp.xpertuniverse.com)

• Autonomy (www.autonomy.com)

• Entopia (www.entopia.com)

Meetings

• Meetup(www.meetup.com)

Social Networks

• Tribe.net (www.tribe.net)

• Orkut (www.orkut.com)

• ICQ Universe(http://universe.icq.com)

Professional Networking

• LinkedIn(www.linkedin.com)

• eCademy(www.eCademy.com)

• Ryze (www.ryze.com)

Affecting Learningby Enabling and

Strengthening PersonalRelationships andNetwork Building

* Microsoft developed and runs Wallop.

Source: Small World Ventures; SRI Consulting Business Intelligence (SRIC-BI)

Dating

• Friendster (www.friendster.com)

• Match.com (www.match.com)

• Yahoo Personals(http://personals.yahoo.com)

• Friendfinder (www.friendfinder.com)


• By improving the effectiveness of processes for capturing tacit knowledge and informallearning. One area of learning in which face-to-face and personal contact is particularlyimportant is the ability to access tacit knowledge (knowledge that is difficult to explain inconversation or in written form). Experts with long experience in a particular domain knowinstinctively how to perform complex tasks but often cannot clearly explain or describe whatthey do or how they do it. Only by observing and working closely with an expert can learnerstap into such knowledge. Establishing personal relationships and gaining access to expertsthrough formal or informal networks—and establishing trust between people—are important totransfer tacit knowledge.

• By enabling and extending loosely coupled networks. Most people belong to one or morenetworks inside and outside the workplace, and SNCs can help strengthen existing networkrelationships or build new ones. Research studies by IBM and others show that “looselycoupled” networks—those among people with “weak ties”—are particularly important forinnovation. Thus, stimulating and supporting such networks can result in high-payoff learningactivities.

• By helping organizations build and strengthen communities of practice (CoPs). Numerouscompanies in the oil, pharmaceutical, and other industries have found that communities ofpractice are effective tools for learning and knowledge sharing. Technologies that enableorganizations to map communication flows and interactions (and that can identify individualsand groups with insufficient ties to other parts of the organization) can help build and strengthenCoPs and thus improve both individual and organizational learning. Systems that help identifyexperts in critical areas of need can also build CoPs.

THE LEARNING IMPLICATIONS OF NETWORK ANALYSIS

Social-network analysis has a long tradition, especially in the social sciences. Some analysts havedeveloped tools and methodologies to map and display visually the social networks in organizations.Karen Stephenson, professor in Harvard University’s School of Design and Imperial College’s Schoolof Management at the University of London, is one of the leading researchers doing in-depth studiesof corporations. She has mapped communications and interactions to examine the true dynamics oforganizations.

Organizational charts clarify formal reporting relationships in companies, but they seldom capturethe true dynamics of people’s communications and interactions in an organization. Typically, peopleparticipate in a number of overlapping networks that help determine how work actually takes place.(These networks also reveal important elements of an organization’s culture, according to Stephenson:“A network is the invisible structure of culture.”) Ignorance of the workings of these informal networkscan be disastrous: One study that analyzed the impact of reengineering efforts describes a number ofcompanies that removed people who played important and unrecognized roles (as “key nodes”) in theorganization’s informal networks.

Below are some of the insights and findings of Stephenson’s work, in which she conductedextensive interviews of employees in a number of firms (from “Quantum Theory of Trust” atwww.ceocoachmn.com: an interview of Karen Stephenson by Art Kleiner; and “What KnowledgeTears Apart, Networks Make Whole” in Internal Communication Focus, No. 36):

• Organizational-network diagrams depict informal networks and the circulation of information—revealing how one can intervene more effectively to improve organizational effectiveness. Often,powerful networkers play key roles in organizations but don’t show up on organizational charts.


THE LEARNING IMPLICATIONS OF NETWORK ANALYSIS—Concluded

• “The association between trust and learning is an instrument of vast, if frequently untapped,organizational power” (Kleiner), and informal social networks in organizations build and strengthentrust. (Building trust is especially important in organizations whose social fabric has weakenedbecause of layoffs, outsourcing, restructuring, and management crises.)

• A “direct cognitive connection [exists] between the amount of trust in an organization and itsmembers’ ability to develop and deploy tacit knowledge together.” (Kleiner)

• “Tacit knowledge is shared through formal and non-formal networks which bond and motivatepeople within the organization.” (Stephenson in Internal Communication Focus)

• The “connections, or networks, of trust are the veins of a natural resource of knowledge, a honeycombof collective consciousness which is mined for hidden sources of innovation. The challenge is todetect them, render them visible, understand their underlying structure and leverage them to increaseproductivity.” (Stephenson in Internal Communication Focus)

In Making Democracy Work (1993)—see The Encyclopedia of Informal Education athttp://www.infed.org—Robert Putnam and his colleagues dealt primarily with networks of civilengagement. However, the following insights from their work have learning implications for corporateand social networks. The authors conclude that networks of civil engagement:

• Increase the potential costs to the defector in any transaction. Opportunism puts at risk the benefitspeople expect to receive from all the other transactions in which they participate.

• Foster robust norms of reciprocity. People who act in many social contexts are likely to developstrong norms for acceptable behavior and to convey their expectations to others. The network ofrelationships reinforces these norms.

• Facilitate communication and improve the flow of information about the trustworthiness ofindividuals. Networks allow reputations to develop and spread. All else being equal, the greater thecommunication among participants, the greater will be their mutual trust and the more easily theywill cooperate.

• Embody past success in collaboration to provide a culturally defined template for futurecollaboration. Continuity allows use of past informal solutions.

Primer on Social-Networking Services, Technologies, and Players

Recent buzz about social-networking services (especially in California’s San Francisco Bay Area,where many SNCs have headquarters) has led some people to wonder if we are entering a miniboom-and-bust cycle. Many SNCs currently seek to help individuals connect to each other (tofriends of friends) for purposes like dating (see Table 1). But a number of other companies aretargeting organizations with the value proposition of helping them discover and connect peopleinside organizations or uncover hidden and useful relationships and resources. Such services meeta growing need—especially in large, multinational, and highly distributed organizations—to cutthrough reams of information to connect quickly to the right people to deal with specific andurgent business problems.


Making such connections and building social and professional networks inside and outsideorganizations to locate expertise on demand can produce value in the following ways:

• Cost savings. Numerous studies show that organizations spend significant time and moneysearching for information or experts within their operations. Because wasted time is increasinglycostly, a technology that streamlines knowledge discovery can produce a quick financialpayback.

• Revenue generation. Innovation and discovery of new business opportunities call for connectingwith the right people and resources at the right time, and a number of the companies in Table 1have technologies and services that can simplify this task and produce significant top-linebenefits. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, can boost their revenue by millions of dollarsby bringing a product to market a month or two earlier than they otherwise would. The fact thatmany of the companies in Table 1 serve pharmaceutical and other life-sciences clients is nocoincidence.

Table 1SELECTED SOCIAL-NETWORKING AND EXPERTISE-LOCATOR COMPANIES

Company(Location) Description

Ryze (SanFrancisco,CA)

• Has become a favorite social-networking destination for freelancers and entrepreneurs

• Has a stronger community orientation than other services (enabling members to establishnew communities easily), with some very large communities and other small, inactive ones

• Coordinates some 30 networking events each month in different cities

LinkedIn(MountainView, CA)

• Offers a relationship-building application for business that targets more senior professionalsthan other services do

• Runs an online invitation-only networking service and gives members control of information

• Has a bottom-up structure, with members submitting contacts

SpokeSoftware(Palo Alto,CA)

• Hosts a social-networking and relationship-building application for business and hastechnology for work groups

• Works top down, with software pulling contacts from workers’ e-mails, contact lists, andonline calendars; rates the strength of relationships

• Requires members’ permission for connections

InterfaceSoftware(Oak Brook,IL)

• Through its InterAction service, pulls information from proprietary databases and publicrecords—and thus has one of the largest databases of potential contacts

• Maps connections between people to promote specific business or social goals

• Lacks the privacy protections and gate-keeping methods of LinkedIn and Spoke

ZeroDegrees(WestHollywood,CA)

• Gained visibility in early March 2004, when Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp—which ownsnumerous online businesses in e-commerce and entertainment—acquired ZeroDegrees

• Focuses on business professionals and therefore competes directly with LinkedIn, Ryze,and Spoke, among others


Table 1—Continued


Visible Path(New York,NY)

• Like Spoke Software, uses client software that pulls data from contact-managementdatabases, e-mail accounts, calendars, directories, and elsewhere

• Compares people’s contact information and organizes maps of connections that aresearchable by name, company, or job function

eCademy(Surrey,England)

• Is a focused business network community with a heavy emphasis on user-generatedcontent, including articles, Web logs, and message posts in “clubs” (discussion forums)

• Offers extensive face-to-face networking events

• In mid-March 2004, had 80% of members from the United Kingdom but launched U.S.eCademy in March 2004 and has clubs around the world

• Serves primarily entrepreneurs, business coaches, consultants, and sales and business-development professionals—most of whom work with business-to-business products andservices

Kamoon (FortLee, NJ)

• Through its Connect Expert product, provides expertise profiling and expert location that isaccessible through portals, e-mail, or a Web browser

• With the addition of Connect Enterprise, offers question-and-answer management as well asknowledge capture and reuse

• Through the Connect Actions product, lets organizations build virtual communities aroundprojects, meeting agendas, and other business activities to improve execution acrossorganizational boundaries

• In mid-2003, formed an alliance with IBM to improve integration of Lotus’s Sametimecollaboration software with Kamoon’s products and thereby allow for online-presenceawareness and instant collaboration

AlwaysOnNetwork (SanFrancisco,CA)

• Allows members to build and maintain professional, personal profile, and peer networks in“AO Zaibatsu,” as well as to create personal mini-blog sites with personalized AlwaysOnWeb addresses

• Enables members to find new business partners, industry experts, and friends and to viewand post messages and send private e-mails to friends and members of groups in the AOZaibatsu

• Through the AlwaysOn Web site, offers a wide range of resources, including informationabout events, classified ads, and an online store

AskMe(Bellvue, WA)

• Uses business rules, work-flow analysis, business analytics, autoprofiling knowledgedelivery, and best-practice engines to create and manage employee-knowledge networks

• Searches stored profiles of company experts to match users’ needs with available companyexpertise

• Examines ratings of experts’ answers as well as experts’ workload before suggestingexperts to users

• Has a long and impressive list of clients around the world


Table 1—Concluded


Entopia(RedwoodShores, CA)

• Offers technology solutions that leverage business context, concepts, and social activityrelating to enterprisewide content to discover and deliver content and expertise automaticallyand dynamically

• Analyzes activities relating to information and personal and business/application contexts todetermine the relevance of search results

• Combines its dynamic expertise location with its visualization techniques in Entopia SocialNetworks Analysis, which identifies the social networks within an enterprise that relate to aspecific topic

Autonomy(SanFrancisco,CA)

• Provides a software infrastructure that automates operations on unstructured information—providing automatic profiling, expertise management, information delivery, and collaborationnetworks

• Creates profiles by analyzing users’ browsing, content use, and content contribution andallows natural-language searches of profiles

• Automatically builds collaboration networks that match users who have common interests

Tacit (PaloAlto, CA)

• Automatically detects employees’ activities in real time, identifying relevant experience,expertise, and potentially valuable business contacts

• Uses a “brokering model” rather than a “publishing model” (common in knowledgemanagement) to broker knowledge relationships

• Alerts people to shared interests without identifying them, giving knowledge holders theopportunity to contact seekers directly or confidentially to decline contact

Tribe.net (SanFrancisco,CA)

• Allows members to join numerous “tribes,” build personal networks, obtain contactrecommendations from friends, and join local events

• By mid-March 2004, had created 1611 music tribes, 412 health and wellness tribes, and 840school and alumni tribes, along with a large number of tribes on other subjects

• Enables searches for events within a certain distance from specific zip codes

• Has a listing directory and in March 2004, announced a partnership with CareerBuilder.com,a leading online career site with more than 16 million unique monthly visitors

Meetup.com(New York,NY)

• Provides a global platform to help people organize real-world group gatherings aroundtopics of interest in thousands of cities worldwide

• Since launching in June 2002, has signed up more than 1 million people to Meetup in theirneighborhoods

• Gained visibility by helping launch Democrat Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign

Source: SRI Consulting Business Intelligence (SRIC-BI)


Table 1 lists many of the best-known players in the social-networking and expert-locationspace. Other companies in these markets include Verity, which provides “intelligent contentservices,” including search, classification, recommendation, monitoring/alerting, and question-and-answer interfaces; Livelink, which provides collaboration and content-management software,including virtual team collaboration, online meetings, business-process automation, enterprisegroup scheduling, and search services; and Tomoye, which offers software solutions to helpcompanies take advantage of their collective know-how by building better communities ofpractice. Companies like CommuniSpace and iCohere support social and professional networkingby providing technology platforms for building and supporting communities of practice, and manycompanies in the knowledge-management market provide technologies and services that supportsocial networking and expertise location.

As SNCs search for the configuration of features and services—and the business model—thatcan bring sustainable revenue growth and profitability, they will likely pursue mergers andacquisitions and strategic alliances. Many of the companies in Table 1 are relatively recent start-ups, so the market needs time to sort out which companies will survive and in what form. Theideal configuration of service features will depend on the specific market and customer segmentthat a vendor targets (see the box just below for one venture capitalist’s view of the ideal serviceconfiguration).

THE PERFECT SOCIAL-NETWORKING SERVICE

Christopher Allen—founder of Alacrity Ventures, an angel capital-investment firm—offers thefollowing vision of the perfect social-networking service:

My ideal service would have the multiple professional affiliation features of LinkedIn, butalso allow me to show non-professional affiliations. It would allow me to form intentionalcommunities like Tribe.net, but would also let me do a Wiki [Wikis enable collective authoringof documents in a simple markup language using a Web browser] in addition to a messageboard. It would have meeting/party invite services like eVite, and blogging features likeLiveJournal. It would have an endorsement system like LinkedIn integrated not only withprofessional endorsements, but personal endorsements as well, and you could even endorseintentional communities. It would let me better map and control my network, giving differentfriends different privileges. It would handle the release of my personal information like Ryse,but less clunky. (http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2003/12/evaluating_soci.html/; 16 December2003)

Processes for Capturing Tacit Knowledge and Informal Learning

Social-networking technologies help identify and establish personal connections and thus can helpbuild both formal and informal networks. All organizations have formal structures and networks,but research by Karen Stephenson (at Harvard University and the University of London) andothers shows that informal networks play a particularly important role in the effective functioningof most organizations. Both formal and informal networks increasingly reach into the extendedenterprise and beyond. Thus, using social networks to establish closer links with externalindividuals and organizations can help the whole value chain operate efficiently (see Figure 2).


Figure 2FORMAL AND INFORMAL NETWORKS INSIDE AND OUTSIDE ORGANIZATIONS

Karen Stephenson has found that in corporate networks, especially in the informal networksthat influence how work actually takes place in most organizations, the personal trust that peoplebuild through network-based interaction and direct communication is critical to the success ofnetworks. As trust builds in informal networks, the transfer of tacit knowledge improves (seeFigure 3). Transferring tacit knowledge is difficult in traditional eLearning programs without face-to-face, social interaction. If social-network technologies can build and strengthen social networks,they will have an important impact on two key channels of workplace learning: informal learningand tacit learning.

Formal Structure,Processes, andReporting Relationships(Organization Charts)

Formal Networkswith Internal andExternal Members

Informal and SocialRelationships ThatAffect the Dynamicsof Organizations

Informal Networksof Employees,Including PeopleInside and Outsidethe Company

Mentoring Networks ThatCombine Formal and InformalNetworks and Relationships andHave the Sanction of theOrganization

Potential for Mentorsto Use Blogs, Creatingan Important InformalCommunicationsChannel and Enablingthe Capture ofKnowledge

Informal Networks ofEmployees with MembersExternal to the Company

Men

torin

g

Source: SRIC-BI


Figure 3SOCIAL-NETWORKING TECHNOLOGY IN LEARNING AND KNOWLEDGE SHARING

One learning channel that will likely become increasingly important in the future—especiallyas Boomers retire—is mentoring and coaching. Soon-to-be-retired workers or retirees will helptrain younger workers joining organizations. (An excellent paper about passing on the knowledgeand experience of older workers is Gray Matter Matters: Preserving Critical Knowledge in the21st Century by Amy Casher and Eric Lesser of IBM Business Consulting Services). Suchmentoring programs—if companies organize them in ways that motivate knowledgeable workers,and former workers, to participate—could combine formal and informal networks to enableeffective learning. One important benefit would be the transfer of tacit knowledge from retiringand retired workers, who have much valuable experience that companies need. Also, use ofeLearning and other communication tools and technologies can reduce the amount of face-to-faceinteraction necessary in the learning process.

Potential Role andImpact of SNT*

• Enable more effectivenetworking that in turnenables more informallearning.

• Identify unknown learningresources inside or outsidefirms.

• Facilitate development oftrusting relationships thatenable more effectivelearning and transfer of tacitknowledge.

• Help build or supportexisting communities ofpractice as well as “weak-ties” networks thataccelerate innovation.

• Identify hidden resourcesand relationships that cancreate a basis for sharingtacit knowledge.

• Develop social and othernetworks that build trust andenable effective transfer oftacit knowledge.

Learning

FormalInformal

Explicit Tacit

Knowledge

* SNT = social-networking technology.

Source: SRIC-BI

• Formal training andeducation are only onerelatively small part ofoverall workplace learning.

• A growing part of informallearning takes place during(increasingly virtual) team-and community-basedwork.

• A range of tools andtechnologies support bothformal and informallearning.

• Only a small part of theknowledge in an enterpriseis in explicit form (indocuments).

• Transferring tacit knowledgeis especially important forcomplex tasks.

• Personal contacts andnetworking can build afoundation for effectiveknowledge sharing.


Use of “Weak-Ties” Networks to Boost Innovation and Learning

Research by the IBM Institute for Knowledge-Based Organizations, Liisa Valikangas at SRIConsulting Business Intelligence (R843, Corporate Renewal in a Knowledge Network, andD98-2148, Knowledge Exploitation and Exploration in a Firm), and others shows that theexistence and use of weak-ties networks are important for effective innovation. According to anIBM white paper, “people report getting their most useful knowledge from trusted weak ties. Thispoint may seem surprising at first, but conceptually, it makes sense. Individuals with strong tiesoften have similar kinds of knowledge; they are aware of the same people, ideas and concepts.However, individuals with weak ties are likely to have connections to different social networksand are exposed to different types of knowledge and ideas” (Trust and Knowledge Sharing: ACritical Combination, by Daniel Levin, Rob Cross, Lisa Abrams, and Eric Lesser).

A number of networks operate in most enterprises and across the extended enterprise, andthese networks usually overlap in varying degrees (see Figure 4)—depending on the environmentsin which they operate and the way in which they organize. Social-networking technologies cansupport effective operation of these networks and help build and extend the weak-ties networksnecessary for innovation.

Figure 4NETWORK TAXONOMY

Work Network

Social Network Innovation Network

Expert KnowledgeNetwork

Learning Network

Source: Karen Stephenson; SRIC-BI

Weak-Ties Network

Strong-Ties Network


Each of the networks in Figure 4 has processes for informal learning and tacit-knowledgetransfer, and any learning that takes place through these networks occurs because of the interactionof numerous factors. Learning and innovation are also forms of knowledge brokering, as AndrewHargadon points out in “Brokering Knowledge: Linking Learning and Innovation” in Research inOrganizational Behavior (Volume 24, 2002). According to Hargadon, “knowledge brokeringinvolves exploiting the preconditions for innovation that reside within the larger social structureby bridging multiple domains, learning about the resources within those domains, linking thatknowledge to new situations, and finally building new networks around the innovations thatemerge from this process.”

The need for and importance of innovation and new-product development will only increase.Thus, social-networking technologies that can effectively build and extend weak-ties networksinside and outside organizations will see significant payoffs and find increasingly receptivebuyers.

Social Networks That Support Community- and Team-BasedLearning

A number of SNCs allow members to create clubs or communities easily, providing a way toconnect with like-minded people or people who are of interest for business purposes. The fact thatentrepreneurs constitute the largest community in Ryze is no coincidence (see Table 2). As of lateMarch 2004, U.K.-based eCademy had some 900 clubs with self-appointed leaders, but most ofthe clubs have a relatively small number of members (with varying levels of participation)—atleast they have fewer than the communities and “tribes” of Ryze and Tribe do. Although mosteCademy members and clubs are today in the United Kingdom and major European countries,eCademy is expanding into the United States and is also building a regional presence around theworld.

How successful these online communities for social-networking companies will be—insustaining membership growth, increasing members’ participation, and successfully connectingmembers for business purposes—is unclear. But success does not necessarily require largenumbers of members. Niche communities that meet specific needs—and that perhaps can takeadvantage of face-to-face social events that SNCs organize or support—could bring significantbenefits to participants. The ability to access profiles of small-business owners in Eastern Europe,for instance, and to participate in active dialogues about business issues could be useful tobusinesspeople considering doing business in these countries.

Most of the communities and groups that SNCs have created so far are so-called affinitynetworks, according to Soren Kaplan (CEO of iCohere) and Peter Bartlett (e-community organizerat Hewlett-Packard). In their paper “Creating Communities for Collaboration and Learning” oniCohere’s Web site, Kaplan and Bartlett say that these networks comprise “people who sharecommon characteristics and derive value from building relationships based on their sharedinterests. They often involve peer mentoring and a structure to help create connections that lead topersonal and professional opportunities.” Three other types of communities that could develop viaSNC-driven networks are learning communities, communities of practice, and project teams.Although the types of clubs and communities that SNCs support could form on their own withlittle effort, most organizations have had difficulty in building and managing learningcommunities, CoPs, and project teams. Most communities will not survive long if they lackstrong, active leadership and senior-executive sponsorship.


Table 2COMMUNITY MEMBERSHIP IN RYZE, TRIBE, AND eCADEMY

Company CommunitiesNumber ofMembers*

Ryze• Entrepreneurs 5260• Marketing, Channel/Partnership & Sales Execs 3672• Small Business Owners 3374• Million Dollar Mastermind 2958• Ryze New York City 2684• Writers and Editors 2503• International Business 2460• Wild Business Women 2346

Tribe• Mac OS X 1591• Bush versus Kerry 1368• Social Software Intellectuals 1289• SF Bay 1136• Recipe Exchange 1077• No George W. Bush 1049• Crafty Vixens 884

eCademy• Business Referral Club 1391• eCademy Marketplace 818• Gadgets R Us 537• The Entrepreneur Club 440• Mobile Applications Club 438• A Woman’s Place 360• A Home Business 265

* As of 27 March 2004.

Source: Ryze; Tribe; eCademy; SRIC-BI

Tools and Technologies for Supporting Social Networking andLearning

The CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, recently acknowledged that his company missed a majorbusiness opportunity by dedicating only a small part of its enormous R&D budget (some$6.8 billion in 2004) to search technology, thereby allowing Google to gain dominance. ButMicrosoft aims to make up for this mistake because it now recognizes the growing importance ofsearch functionality for both consumers and businesses. (A growing number of other companies


are also targeting the search market, so competition is intensifying. Search companies alsoincreasingly recognize the importance of the so-called blogsphere, as Google’s 2003 purchase ofPyra, the developer of Blogger software, illustrates.) The growing business opportunity in searchtechnology reflects the increasing difficulty of finding needed information quickly in the rapidlygrowing volume of information and data on computer hard drives, in databases inside and outsidecompanies, and in various corners of the Web.

These developments are good news for companies with proprietary technologies that enableefficient search and analysis of large amounts of information and data and that can make sense ofthe information by discovering important (hidden) knowledge resources and relationships.Companies like Tacit and Interface have developed algorithms for continuous monitoring ofdocuments, data, and activity-based information and can link this information to requests forexpertise or use it to identify relationships that are relevant to particular business objectives.(University researchers are also focusing on the area. In mid-2003, the University of SouthernCalifornia’s School of Engineering Information Sciences Institute announced development ofeArchivarius, a tool for organizing and visualizing collections of e-mail messages to showrelationships between messages, identify existing communities of people who converse on thesame topic, and determine relationships among those communities.)

Not surprisingly, IBM has also launched a major search-technology project and has developeda new service that it calls Web Fountain. According to the Financial Times (17 March 2004),“Using algorithms developed in its research labs, this service digs far deeper into the Internet thantraditional search engines, for instance extracting information from chat rooms and blogs (journalsavailable on the web). IBM has sold this capability—Mr. Horn [head of IBM’s Watson ResearchCenter] calls it ‘Google on steroids’—as a one-off service to companies that believe commerciallyimportant information lies buried in the Internet.”

More advanced search, visualization, and pattern-recognition tools will improve informationand knowledge discovery as well as help connect people and foster development of affiliatenetworks, learning communities, CoPs, and project teams. A variety of existing and emergingtechnologies will also support these communities, both by helping people establish them and byenabling easier and more effective communication and collaboration once communities form (seeTable 3).

Kaplan and Bartlett do not mention blogs (or Web logs), but these online creations—as wellas Wikis (a group-communication mechanism based on Internet-browser software)—areincreasingly popular tools for communicating and sharing information. Some analysts think thatblogs and Wikis could become the backbone of enterprise knowledge networks. Blogs are seeinggrowing use in corporations for a variety of purposes, even though these grassrootscommunications exist outside official and sanctioned channels and thus concern many corporatemanagers and executives. Blogs and Wikis are important forms of communication that helpconnect and build informal networks among people. Standards groups and internationalcollaborative R&D groups are now using these tools—as well as other technologies coming out ofthe path-breaking work of Doug Engelbart (on augmenting human intelligence)—to supporteffective collaboration in communities and open distributed teams, through the use of a technologyplatform from CIM3 (see http://www.cim3.net).


Table 3CORE AND SUPPORTING TECHNOLOGIES FOR COMMUNITIES FOR COLLABORATION

AND LEARNING

The Future

Clearly, better understanding of the social aspects of work and learning processes is of great valuein learning initiatives. Moreover, the ability to enable and support such processes—whether theyoccur inside or outside corporate facilities (for example, in home offices or in the field by mobileworkers)—can influence the nature of work or learning as well as people’s effectiveness. User-friendly technologies that allow people to identify and establish new social connections andnetworks are therefore likely to be popular and will find growing use in corporate environmentsonce the positive impacts of such technologies become clear. The availability of credible casestudies of the business benefits of these technologies will help accelerate adoption.

Type of Community Core Technologies Supporting Technologies

Affinity network • “Community”-focused tools, includingsynchronous discussion areas and chats

• Basic document management

• E-mail

• Polls and surveys

• Synchronous Web-conferencing toolsfor periodic online events

• Instant messaging

Learning community • Synchronous Web-conferencing tools

• Streaming audio and video

• Basic document management

• Asynchronous discussion

• E-mail

• Document collaboration

• Chats


Community ofpractice

• Asynchronous discussion areas

• Expert search

• Document management

• Knowledge management

• E-mail

• Synchronous Web-conferencing toolsfor periodic online events

• Document collaboration


Project team • Project-management tools

• Work-flow tools

• Document versioning and management

• Synchronous Web-conferencing tools

• E-mail

• Calendaring


Source: Creating Communities for Collaboration and Learning, Soren Kaplan and Peter Bartlett


Studies have analyzed the relationships between social relationships and networks (startingwith the pathbreaking work of Stanley Milgram at Harvard University in 1967 on the small-worldphenomenon and the six-degrees-of-separation experiment), the trust such networks andcommunities generate, and the impact on learning and knowledge transfer as well as innovation. Inturn, research programs by companies like Microsoft and IBM show that these companiesrecognize the importance of such relationships and the payoffs of using technologies that improveand accelerate social networking. Indeed, Microsoft is pursuing a number of interesting projects inan area the company calls social computing (see Table 4).

Table 4SELECTED MICROSOFT SOCIAL COMPUTING GROUP R&D PROJECTS

Project Description

Wallop Allows users to share photos, blog, and interact with friends

Explores how people share media and build conversations within social networks

Sapphire Aims to have automatic, dynamic grouping of documents by association, replacingfolders as the primary means of organizing

ConversationClusters

Seeks to group e-mail conversations via text indexing using hierarchical clusteringmethods

Personal map Models contacts, communications groups, and social networks

Aims to help users organize their e-mail contacts in a meaningful way, according totheir e-mail behavior

MSR Connections Provides an online social map to show users the informal, dynamic groups andprojects in MSR and allow them to navigate for information using the connectionsbetween people and groups

MS connect andPoint to Point

Uses active directory information to show both formal relationships and informal,dynamic relationships between people

Recognizes that any knowledge and resource transfer across groups in anorganization depends on social awareness of who is doing what, which is a challengeto document because of the dynamic, informal nature of many groups and projects

PhotoStory Aims to preserve emotional content in storytelling with photos and video

NearMe Relies on the buddy-list service for global system for mobile communications phonesand notifies users when their buddies are nearby using cell-location information

Bridge Studies the effect of location and awareness of groups on learning

Trust online Uses social-dilemma testing to study how different modes of communication anddifferent aspects of user interfaces affect trust and cooperation

Online-communityanalysis

Studies what makes people actively participate in online communities, what makes acompelling group, what types of online communities are popular, and other questions

Source: Microsoft; SRIC-BI


Not only are we likely to see consolidation among SNCs in the next few years, but we mayalso see vendors incorporate various social-networking technologies into other enterpriseplatforms. Spoke, for example, is positioning itself close to customer-relationship–management(CRM) solutions, working to ensure seamless integration with leading CRM suites (particularlySeibel and SalesForce). Most companies in the enterprise-relationship–management segment arelikely to become acquisition targets for these much larger, established CRM players in the nearfuture. This scenario is compelling because these companies are well positioned to put social-network technologies to good business use and enable marketers to find new routes to keyinfluencers and decision makers of their prospective and current customers. Currently, much ofthis valuable information is hidden in personal knowledge and not sufficiently known incompanies. With fast changes in organizations as well as increasing international rotations, social-networking technology takes on greater importance.

Some vendors may also integrate social-networking technologies into learning products andplatforms—as a way of bringing a social element to eLearning. This step would take the much-discussed blended model of learning to a new level and result in more effective learning.

CONTRARIAN VIEWS ON SOCIAL-NETWORKING SERVICES: ERSATZRELATIONSHIPS

Jay Cross of the Internet Time Group and CEO of the Emergent Learning Forum has been a frequentand outspoken commentator on learning and eLearning-related issues and developments, both throughhis Internet Time blog and the blog he writes for the American Society for Training and Development.Here are a few perspectives on Jay’s recent experience with and views about social networking—which he sees as “ersatz relationships”—and those of another blogger, David Weinberger, whom Jayoften agrees with:

• Jay receives a steady flow of LinkedIn requests to connect someone he does not know to someoneelse he does not know because a friend of a friend in each direction knows the person. He hasrefused to make most of these introductions because he does not see why he should do so.

• Jay agrees wholeheartedly with David Weinberger, who writes the JOHO—or Journal of theHyperlinked Organization—blog (see http://www.hyperorg.com/) and who recently offered his takeon what he calls Artificial Social Networks (ASNs). According to David, “First, ASNs attempt torecreate our social network by making us be explicit about it. But our social bonds are necessarilyimplicit. Making social relationships explicit uproots them, distorts them and can do violence tothem. Just try describing your child to someone, with your child in the room. Second, ASNs makeus be precise about that which is necessarily messy and ambiguous. This not only leads to awkwardsocial moments (Am I a friend of some person I met once and don’t know if I like?), it also reinforcesthe worst idea of our age: The world is precise, so our ambiguity about it is a failure. Third, theyinculcate the stupid belief that relationships are commutative. LinkedIn is especially guilty of this.I have been C in a five-term series that A initiated in order to contact E, which means someone Idon’t know asked someone I marginally know to introduce him to someone I kind of know whomaybe knows someone I don’t know at all. The formal name for this is ‘using people.’ (See my firstparagraph.) Fourth, the fact that they require explicitness in public about relationships guaranteesthat they will generate inordinate amounts of bullshit. For example, some ASNs let you write‘testimonials’ about your friends, a feature destined to encourage flattery and sucking up. Worse,they don’t let you refuse testimonials as part of your profile, so I’ve had to explain to a handful ofpeople why I’m not accepting the sweet sentences they spent time putting together.”


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CONTRARIAN VIEWS ON SOCIAL-NETWORKING SERVICES: ERSATZRELATIONSHIPS—Concluded

• David makes the final comment that “I want to say to the Friendsters of the world, we alreadyinvented a social network for friends and strangers. It’s called the Internet. Why are you privatizingit? Why do we need a proprietary sub-network to do what the Internet has already done in an openway? I don’t like this thing coming along that implies that the existing social networks on theInternet—my social networks, the ones that constitute my social world—are so inadequate thatsome badly designed system with a derivative name (enoughster with the ‘sters’ alreadyster!) sweepsthe Net like photos of Janet Jackson’s poppin’ fresh wardrobe malfunction. What’s a matter, the Netwasn’t good enough for you?”