Enhancing Performance in Virtual Knowledge Networks

Book excerpt: With the transformation from an industrial to an information-based society, corporations are required more than ever to utilize all their employees' knowledge to keep up with market demands. Therefore, personal informal networks and communities are becoming the major information resource in addition to the classical handbooks and document management systems containing highly structured information objects. Many technically sophisticated systems for document and content management have been designed to assist knowledge workers in exchanging information and expertise, but in most cases they fail to meet expectations. This book presents one possible solution to assist network organizers in designing informal knowledge networks by introducing a model and a software toolset to improve decision support. The model, based on findings from computational organization theory and social network analysis, extends the existing explanatory research, and allows for developing appropriate strategies of community engineering and anticipating the potential impacts on organizational performance before taking action.