Social Network Analysis Application for Knowledge Management System Needs Elicitation in Knowledge-Based Organizations

Knowledge management is recognized as one of the necessary business processes of knowledge based organizations. Today, without the use of capabilities of knowledge management systems, effective management of knowledge is hardly possible; inevitably, for the effective use of these systems, recognizing the needs of the organization is of considerable importance. On the other hand, since organizations typically have limited budgets, and purchasing and implementing these systems require large investment, prioritizing organizational needs become a prominent issue. This article shows how to use social network analysis approach for extracting knowledge management system needs in knowledge based organizations. For this purpose, we used Pereira and Saoirse proposed method [1], which were used before to select the document management systems or wiki system in an R&D organization. For knowledge management systems needs elicitation, we proposed four main stages: defined criteria for evaluating collaboration, selecting appropriate methods and measures to evaluate defined collaboration criteria, data collection for evaluating collaboration criteria, and knowledge management systems requirement elicitation. For data collection, the amount of interactions of individuals together in an institute is measured through a questionnaire. The results indicate application of social network analysis to identify organizational needs. Among features that a knowledge management system should have in order to be effective are: the importance of socialization, externalization, search and retrieval, transactive memory, and meta-knowledge capabilities, which can be determined by using this method. Applying the proposed method in our case study showed systems that can produce information sites to explain information among people has much higher importance than any other systems. At the end, it is proposed to achieve more complete understanding of organizational needs and priorities of other knowledge management system capabilities, and to use other methods such as knowledge audits along with social network analysis.