This chapter focuses on how four important drivers — awareness, access, engagement, and safety — influence how knowledge travels across informal networks. It describes a research program to determine the means for improving employees' ability to create and share knowledge in important social networks. In the first phase of the research, characteristics of relationships that forty managers relied on for learning and knowledge sharing in important projects were assessed. In the second phase, social network analysis was employed to map these dimensions of relationships among strategically important networks of people in various organizations. Working with a consortium of Fortune 500 companies and government organizations, empirical support for relational characteristics that facilitate knowledge creation and sharing in social networks was developed as well as insight into social and technical interventions to facilitate knowledge flow in these networks.

This chapter examines how social network analysis can be used as a diagnostic technique for better understanding myriad organizational challenges, ranging from improving communication between functional organizations to identifying key knowledge-sharing roles and responsibilities. A research program is described that aims to determine how organizations can better support work occurring in informal networks of employees. Working with a consortium of Fortune 500 companies and government agencies, collaboration and work in over forty informal networks from twenty-three different organizations was assessed. In all cases, the networks studied provided strategic and operational value to the embedding organization by enabling employees to effectively collaborate and integrate disparate expertise.