Managing information systems is, of course, much more than managing technical infrastructures. It’s managing the flow of information throughout your organization and beyond.  This may include the manner in which electronic information is shared and used via technology, but as many of us know, the majority of information is held by people.  People share this information via interactions based on responsibility chains and trust.

Just as we perform technical infrastructure analysis to determine optimal configurations for access control, bandwidth, redundancy, and the like, an often overlooked type of analysis known as Social Network Analysis (SNA) is equally (possibly more) important.  By analyzing the links between individuals and both objectively measuring (number of interactions) and subjectively measuring (quality of interactions) you begin to see patterns of trust, dependency, and inefficiencies.  Given the range of tools now available to help collect this information (via surveys or automated “blind surveillance” using email and phone logs) and visualization tools to communicate the findings, SNA is finally gaining momentum as a mainstream practice.

Typical patterns that you may see emerge from this analysis are:

• Individuals that serve as bridges between functional areas
• Individuals that are key experts (recognized by others)
• Individuals that are critical paths and potential bottlenecks
• Disconnected or untapped peripheral resources
• Gaps or rifts between functional silos
• Knowledge risks

Just as an infrastructure audit will produce action items to be addressed by the technical staff, social network analysis will likely show areas in which optimization, improvement, or risk mitigation is required.  For example, if you note that you have numerous key experts nearing retirement, you will need to focus on knowledge and trust transfer soon (trust transfer may take years).  If you find individuals acting as information hubs, you may want to build redundant paths so they do not become a bottleneck.

Back in the technology world, information managers should take SNA seriously before implementing large scale knowledge management solutions.  While these can be great vehicles to improve the overall social connectivity across the enterprise, remember that while it may be possible to capture “knowledge” it is much more difficult to capture “trust”.  With the emergence of other relationship and knowledge sharing vehicles such as corporate blogs and channel partner extranets it has become the information manager’s job to orchestrate the ever changing social interaction network in the same way they do a technical infrastructure if they want to indeed optimize their organization’s information capital.

SNA is also an important aspect of the book The Tipping Point.  In it, Malcolm Gladwell speaks of the notion of Connectors (who know everyone) and Mavens (experts who love to teach) which are catalysts of social epidemics.  Obviously, what applies outside the organization also applies within.