Social Networks & Communities Of Practise

Social Network:
Social network is a group of people interacting at different levels & environments. The interaction is independent of any interest, purpose or focus and can be transactional. A social network exists on a basic level of a family to a wider network as huge as contries and even the entire world. The achievemnets of the individuals at personal level extends itself to the development of the entire network.

Communities Of Practice (COP):
Communities of practice are group of people getting together having similar interests, tied with a purpose and are working together to enhance information, knowledge and experience. COPs are existent regardless of the social and organizational boundaries having limited control unlike organizations. A COP existing in one framework can be a part of another one sharing similar interests, focus or purpose.

According to Wenger, the definition of COP extends beyond certain practices in a community. According to him the practice extends itself to every aspect of human life and have two essential components i.e. reification and participation. The combination of the two is devised to answer the complexity of the concept forming a duality.

Reification:
Reification in knowledge is a process of verifying the credibility of an information which would otherwise be manipulated. In this particular concept we verify and corroborate the information checked against each other for validity and authenticity.
Reification according to Wenger can be attributed to designing, representing, naming, encoding and describing as well as perceiving, interpreting, using, reusing, decoding and recasting. (Wenger, 1998: 58-59)

Participation:
This according to Wenger is an interesting concept where he takes a different stance on participation. Participation according to him can be conflicting and collaborative or competitive as well as cooperative. In other words different groups working in conjunction or against each other still participates in a social enterprise. (Wenger, 1998: 55-56)
If we look into the essence of these two ingredients we come to realize that the stress is on creation and and contribution of knowledge, regardless of the ideas being in sync or opposite, however they participate in the propensity of knowledge.


The image above gives an idea about the relationship of reification and participation forming a duality. A couple of things that can be noted from the illustration is that two of them coexists and should be proportionate to each other to achieve a balanced framework. The one concept that requires attention is that the actors at the participation level either conflicting or collaborating, competitive or cooperating are participating towards the support of knowledge, so the ideas can be similar or different, elements can be active or passive however they are working in conjunction with each other for enhancing knowledge.

The duality of knowledge concept outlines the classic concepts of KM from the internalization to the externalization phase and makes use of the knowledge environment as its stronghold. Consider the example of different focus groups whether discussion or technical, educational or medical, social or political contributes towards the propagation of knowledge whether they are proponents are opposers.

COPs exist physically as well as are cybercentric, however regardless of their state they leverage knowledge, share best practices, and in turn provide immense knowledge which would otherwise be unexplored. The COPs are not only the means of sharing and exchanging knowledge but are a huge source of inspiration. Lets take an example of a focus group on cancer where they can share their experiences in dealing with this traumatic reality to the way of combatting this life threatening ailment.

Managing Knowledge through Social Technologies:

Social interaction or communication and systems cannot be underestimated both academically and professionally. This was proven by an exercise that we did in a knowledge cafe' set up. We as a class were to come up with three "must nots" for the advancement of an organization. There were four groups supposed to be working independently and coming up with their findings as to what are the three top causes for the demise of an organization. Although quite expected but shockingly enough having no communication or lack or no socialization in an organization was one of the most common reasons in all of the four groups effecting an organization along with inaffective systems. No system and lack of communication were the two most common determinants as the impedement for the realization of progress in any organization. Here is a snapshot of what each group feels the reason of a down turn for any organization.

Group 1

1. No communication

2. No expression of ideas

3. No documentation or procedures

Group 2

1. No internal & external communication

2. No documentation

3. No learning and development

Group3

1. No socialization & culture

2. No systems

3. No training & development

Group 4.

1. No Information

2. No improvement of performance

3. No systems or tools.

If we take into account the two of them i.e systems and socialization or communication it becomes quite evident that socialization/communication and technology reigns high as a factor in the development of any organization. This opens up another avenue of thinking which involves the technologies impacting the social onset of an organization. A lot of these technologies are being used targeting the social and communication advancement in an organization. I personally experienced the importance of these technologies working in a Business processing outsourcing and re engineering company involving employees working in different parts of the world achieving a common goal. In a conventional set up where employees see each other everyday; socialization is undermined or taken for granted, because of them having the privilege to see each other everyday, have meetings, water cooler discussions, and even interacting with each other on personal level. However having that kind of privilege in an organization where employees are located around the world and working on one project becomes very far fetched to have an interaction at a personal level. Most of the time working in groups over the phones and emails not only lacks the essence of an existence of a team it also can be frustrating at times because of the lack of one on one interactions and the absence of tangible emotions. This is the reality of the VOIP (voice over IP) era in the 21st century corporate world where we may not have any control over having Marketing department in the US, Accounts and Finance in Canada, Operations in Philippines and Customer Services in India or Pakistan. However we can try bridging these gaps between cross continental boundaries by introducing technologies geared towards socialization. Most of them like face book, link in, dig it to name a few are cyber-centric others rely on telephony like video conferencing and camferencing.

Please stay tuned in for the upcoming postings where we will be analyzing these technologies and their impact on socio-technical environment of an organization and provide us with your valueable insight on the topic which is always much appreciated.

KM and Law of Modalities:
Looking at the works of scholars, social scientists and literates we have come to realize that almost all of them unanimously agree upon the following compositions for knowledge management which are Knowledge creation, knowledge acquisition, knowledge communication, knowledge sharing, knowledge warehousing and dissemination. In going through all these concepts from inception of knowledge to the transport of knowledge we go through a process of internalization of knowledge to its externalization. However there is a lack of explanation of as to how this process is governed.
I personally believe that the answer lies partly if not completely in Lawrence Lessig's law of modalities, where consumer behavior is an interplay between four components i.e Law, Society, Architecture, and Markets. My view in regards to this relationship is a massive stress on consumerism which not only determines our knowledge but that in turns leads to our behavior.

Law
Law reigns supreme in anything that we do and is the primary source of impacting mindset and behaviors that eventually leads to knowledge. Lets take a simple example of education being imperative for children at a certain level, by doing so we are creating a knowledge based society which is the base of creation and dissemination of knowledge.

Society
As defined in Wikipedia" A society is a grouping of individuals which is characterized by common interests and may have distinct culture and institutions." Where culture is referred to as the patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that gives those activities significance and importance. Institutions are referred to as the mechanism of social order and cooperation governing the behavior of two or more individuals. It means that behaviors are governed collectively and formulates a mindset intrinsic to that particular society. If we are to infuse a collective mindset it has to be introduced at the societal level for that to become a norm. It is because of social norms and behaviors that certain societies emerge to be knowledge based societies whereas others still struggles to initiate those activities at a broader level.

Architecture
Architecture are support mechanisms that help create, acquire, communicate, share and disseminate knowledge. The existence of knowledge institutions, think tanks, knowledge power houses, technology, are all characterized as architecture directly supporting knowledge leading to knowledge based societies.

Markets
Market is the end user where all these outcomes of knowledge are directed towards. The influx of consumerism and the presence of giants corporations and multinationals are catering the consumer and knowledge needs of the market. A consumer of today is blessed with so may options and price range of products in the market however it does require knowledge on the part of consumer to weigh his or her options for opting a product. In the end markets becomes a feed for all the knowledge to be pushed back into society governed law and supported by architecture.

Knowledge Management Definitions:
The knowledge management comprises of three major components involved in the creation, storage and the dissemination of knowledge. These variables are imperative to encompass the entire knowledge management systems. These variables are regardless of the model that is applied for the processes of an organization, however are the means of converting a tacit knowledge into explicit which in turns results for the storage and eventually leads to the transport of the information. In the process of going through all the process there is one thing that can be taken into account which is the conversion of the tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. Either intrinsic to the individuals or an organization the one thing that can be taken into account is the transformation of an intangible information to a tangible information which can be stored and processed as desired.
If we were to analyze the model that we just discussed we will come to know that Knowledge Management overlooks Intellectual capital. Knowledge in this scenario is the form of tacit knowledge which when becomes explicit takes the shape of "Intellectual Capital", which can be translated to more meaningful source of implementation.

Knowledge Management:

It is a greater term devised to oversee the Knowledge systems of an organization and being able to retrieve the information from the repositories, and its implications on the entire knowledge based systems. The management of Knowledge is becoming more and more mission critical as more and more knowledge variables are added to the mix. Some of the few areas but not limited to these that comes under this greater term are; content management, data mining, Information management and some of the systems that engineer Knowledge management are content integration, content delivery, corporate portals, intra nets, internet, search engines, secure content management and storage management. The entire phenomenon of Knowledge management is becoming as important to the countries as to the organizations as the world is drawing more and more towards globalism and a knowledge based society. The threats of the 21st century like global terrorism and pandemics to name a few are adding fuel to the fire. The development of the enterprise solutions like SAP, Oracle, MS CRM are the outcomes of the organization's need to have a stable and reliable knowledge management systems. The development of the color coded security system (dependent on credible information) devised by the department of Homeland Security to ensure security are few examples of the need for the efficient knowledge management systems.

The primary information management concern in the enterprise today is to ensure that the knowledge necessary to drive critical business processes is available where it needs to be, when it needs to be. The costs of failure to do this are high. A recent study of 80 large organizations by Infonetics Research found that overall downtime costs averaged an astounding 3.6% of annual revenue!

In another study, Forrester estimated the average cost of downtime for e-commerce sites at $8,000 per hour -- at larger sites like eBay, Intel and Amazon, the costs soar to hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour.

Knowledge management is not confined only to the system facilitation or an engine to draw revenues rather it is a paradigm that compares the old and the modern management paradigms draws parallels and perpendiculars between them which has led to the inception of different KM models which are emerging and evolving as any other technology, theory and praxis.

Although there are different schools of thought for KM there is one by Peters which came out in 1992 can be revisited simply because of the rapid advancement in IT compared to the time of it's inception; the school of thought states " The crux of the issue is not information, information technology... the answer turns out to lie more with psychology and marketing of knowledge within the family than with bits and bytes". I completely agree with the fact that the crux of the issue does lie beyond the realm of Information technology however the importance of IT cannot be undermined. Besides even if we have all the knowledge and Information in the world but do not have the vehicle to transport this information will not do us much good.

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