Collaborative Knowledge Management, Social Networks, and Organizational Learning

Organizational learning is a set of processes by which organizations improve their performance. Performance processes consist of one or more goals, outcome measures, constituent steps, and relevant people, artifacts, and knowledge. Learning processes furthermore require that the organization anticipates and attends to feedback, creates knowledge from that feedback, and takes action based on that knowledge. Relationships among people can be modeled as social networks in which network nodes represent people and network arcs represent relationships (e.g., friendship, advice, supervisor-subordinate relations) that change over time. Social networks also form a resource for collaborative knowledge management: the creation, exchange, and transformation of knowledge. Information technology offers several possibilities for making social networks and collaborative knowledge management more visible, inspectable, and systematic, which may aid the process of organizational learning.