How to Value and Monitor the Relational Capital of Knowledge-Intensive Organizations

Abstract

Knowledge management systems are a way to help tracking and keeping organizational knowledge. Typically, organizations value is greater than their tangible assets value. Human, structural, and relational capital is essential knowledge but difficult to evaluate because it tends to be tacit and spread in different organizational elements. The relational capital, as tacit knowledge, is not possible to capture its value as from accounting systems. There is a lack of models to evaluate the relational capital of organizations in a network perspective and this research question is: What is the value of this social network? SNARE (Social Network Analysis and Reengineering Environment) is a framework with engineering artifacts that can answer this question. With the aim of evaluating the relational capital of organizations, the authors develop three SNARE components: (1) SNARE-Language – a descriptive UML-based method that provides a representation of an abstract social network structure able to be extended and applied to organizations; (2) SNARE-RCO – a model to determine the relational capital of organizations; and (3) SNARE-Explorer – based on SNARE-Language, is a tool for social networks visualization able to simulate or use real social network scenarios. It also uses SNARE-RCO model to compute the value of the organizational relational capital. The chapter presents an approach for the measurement of the value of organizations' networks.

What is the Value of Your Network?

“…As depicted in Fig. 3, we found that predominant relational capital value refers to the Information Share relational action, and relational action Problem has the lowest RCV [15]. …”

“…Vodafone case study was focused on the analysis of the relational capital of six teams from a Vodafone Portugal Unit: GSS [15].…”

“…Data was collected from LOP database and users were analyzed, as well as associated relational actions: download and comment learning objects [15]. Fig.…”

“…The target universe contained 229 employees. 207 questionnaires were delivered and collected (162 Teachers, 11 Technical Assistants and 34 Operational Assistants) [15]. The questionnaire contained several questions, and the closed-answer questions were defined as follows: "Who transmits important information to carry out your functions?…”

“…We used SNARE-Explorer as a prototype system to compute and monitor the relational capital of organizational networks and we validated it using controlled case studies [15][16]. The RCV of validation cases was computed through a bottom-up approach.…”