What is the Value of Your Network?

Abstract

Knowledge management systems help organizations to track organizational knowledge such as human, structural or relational capital. The relational capital of organizations tends to include intangible factors and, consequently, it is not always possible to determine this value from traditional business oriented accounting systems. The problem addressed in this research is: how to analyze this capital to achieve a network evaluation metric. Thus, answer the question: "What is the value of your network?". This research has been developed in the SNARE ("Social Network Analysis and Reengineering Environment") project that involves engineering artifacts to extract, analyze and monitor the value of social networks. The SNARE-RCO (short for "Relational Capital of Organizations") model allows us to define and evaluate the relational capital of organizations. it combines techniques derived from social network analysis with aspects of organizational assessment, including also human and structural capital. This paper reviews SNARE-RCO's main elements, which are applied to compute the relational capital value of three social networks, namely: (1) Telecommunications operator, (2) School, and (3) Collaborative social platform.