That’s kind of like a SNA as it’s happening. And it’s kind of like a value/ROI, as socialcast will be providing connections and answers that normally wouldn’t happen…the system is creating conditions for these interactions or gifts, it’s enabling the surfacing of know-how and connecting it to where it’s needed on demand. The bonus is you get to talk to someone to re-frame that know-how for your situation, and you also may add that person as a new contact.

At my work, just the fact the some of our online communities have a mix of cross functional is a great start…they are explicitly getting around the vertical walls.

The online communities we use at work are a bit more old school, but they do enable someone (even if they are not a member) to ask a question across multiple communities. But we don’t have a way of tracking this as you do, unless we do it manually (which is possible I guess).

We still have the head of marketing emailing requests to all staff (thousands of people) for experts to help with a job or task. They say they have a 90% success rate. The bad part is they don’t record these transactions; which is a pity as they are finding out that people are experts in things beyond what their current job title displays. The other bad part is the occupational spam

We are about to pilot a social network (which I guess are the new breed of expert locators), so it’s our hope that people may bottom-up (self-serve) self-organise this job request task, rather than go through the head of marketing. They will simply be able to look up profile tags, search and visit profiles (blogs)…anyway this would be good as a first step. We forsee this brings discovery and connects people so they may come together in new communities.

Your closing comment is so right, and I see that the long-term effect is that these weak-tie transactions are building strength in the bridging capital (structural holes). Which means that over time the network structure will crystallize where most people will be easily connected to an answer.
http://johntropea.tumblr.com/post/84717027/here-comes-everybody-clay-shirky-p222-230-1

Organisations are hierarchies, whereas people are networked oriented…and we use our informal networks to get things done in the workplace…it’s up to us to be effective.
SNA uncovers this, and tools like Socialcast enable networks. The difference with online networks is that we can at last see in action what has always been happening in our offline practices, and it also leaves a corporate memory. I think eventually this will lead to enterprise 2.0 where we will be a true blend of networks and hierarchy.

Great post. One of the most interesting pieces of data that our clients look is “where” answers come from. Inside our communities, we have a “Q&A” module that tracks answers by user and their location/business unit. This allows companies to understand if information is flowing within the same departments/locations or if knowledge is being transferred across boundaries. Many companies are surprised to see that the most relevant answers often come from employees who, without using an internal community, would never have been able to provide that data.

The NASAsphere case study that was recently release shows that over 90% of questions were answered by NASA users in a different geographic location (case study is here: http://bit.ly/Rvyvz). This is a prime example of how social networks in the Enterprise can facilitate an extremely relevant search of tribal knowledge and specialized expertise that would otherwise stay trapped.