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.