It was delightful to spend time with clients over the past few days at the BPM Summit. The conversations ranged from how to increase collaboration to best practices for process improvement to how social networking can add value to the business. What impressed me about all the people I spoke with was their willingness to share their experiences and learn from their peers.
One of the undercurrents of many conversations and 1-1 meetings was the concern over the potential loss of valuable process knowledge in the near future as companies respond to the economic difficulties by downsizing the workforce. Many people were searching for ways to capture this process knowledge without resorting to the heavy-handed techniques that were used in earlier eras of KM.
So it seems like this is the perfect time to explore the organizational fabric of firms and examine how work gets done using social network analysis. Perhaps that’s why my session on getting value from social networks was well attended even though it was in the second to last slot of the event. We’ve used BI to extract insight from data; the time has come to use BI to extract insight from social networks.
