"SNA identifies the go-to experts and can help companies find the technical knowledge within their organization needed to develop a new drug, launch a new product and stay ahead of the competition," says David DeLong, author of Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce and a researcher at MIT’s AgeLab.

SNA isn’t a replacement for traditional KM tools such as knowledge databases or portals, but it can provide companies with a starting point or blueprint for how best to proceed with KM initiatives. And SNA alone can’t always provide crucial information about why people behave as they do, says Hal King, CEO of market research company King, Brown & Partners. "SNA as a KM tool is basically a monodimensional analysis that still needs to be supplemented by demographics, and most importantly, attitudes," says King. As a component to a larger KM strategy, however, SNA can help companies identify key leaders and then set up mechanisms—such as "communities of practice" or other groups—so that those leaders can pass on their knowledge to colleagues.

SNA Goes Corporate

Social network analysis got its start as a social theory developed by scientists in the 1930s who were exploring social patterns. One of those researchers, a New York City psychiatrist named Jacob Moreno, is often credited with inventing the "sociogram," a diagram of points and lines designed to illustrate relationships and social interactions among people. Scientists and mathematicians built on these ideas over several decades, investigating ways in which people get jobs, become leaders and develop friendships. They then mapped the flow of information through social networks. From the start, SNA has attracted philosophers, sociologists and statisticians looking to analyze human relationships in a mathematical and visual way.

According to Valdis Krebs, an SNA guru who worked with IBM and started his own SNA software company called Orgnet.com, SNA can be defined as "the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers, or other information- or knowledge-processing entities."

Over the past several years, with help from Krebs and other SNA believers, the corporate world has been waking up to the uses for this once arcane social science. Some of the interest stems from disappointment with efforts to build knowledge management databases that were largely ignored by employees. "We’re seeing that companies want to have a picture of who the key knowledge brokers are in their organization," says Cross. "The rise of blogs, online support sites and social networking sites—such as Friendster and LinkedIn—have also helped raise SNA’s profile."