IT-Supported Visualization of Knowledge Community Structures

In the first part of this article, Communities of Practice are conceptually positioned as a very important and successful element of corporate Knowledge Management. By utilizing IT platforms they enable a direct connection of knowledge workers and the transfer and reuse of tacit expertise to geographically remote business problems. Although current Community Software provides its members with many sophisticated features, facilitators or moderators still lack functionalities to monitor, evaluate and communicate the development of their expert networks. After discussing the requirements of this special target group, this contribution concentrates on electronic discussions and proposes a software system for automatically analyzing the structure and value of Knowledge Communities by extracting available electronic data about their communication network. This includes the entities employee, topic, and document and their many relationships. Insightful structural visualizations based on theories of Network Analysis are introduced. They can be accessed and manipulated in a Management Cockpit to improve the transparency in communities.