Identifying knowledge brokers in enterprise social media

Abstract

Knowledge brokers act as a bridge between people and issues; they facilitate knowledge creation and sharing, and connect communities of practice. The extant literature has focused mostly on roles and network positions of knowledge brokers. This paper adds communicative actions to identifying these important actors. In the present study we develop and propose a method to identify knowledge brokering communication in an enterprise social media (ESM) platform. We posit that active knowledge brokers can be identified based on their generic social media communication. We use a large data set containing 124,015 messages among employees, and their network positions by social network analysis to identify knowledge brokers, and further analyze a sample of the communication content qualitatively. We argue that better understanding of the identification of knowledge brokering communication in a collaboration network can benefit employee assignments and help develop communication practices in ESM, leading to improved knowledge sharing and creation.