I think Krebs provides a hint to this system-centric view of information and knowledge in “Knowledge Networks: Mapping and Measuring Knowledge Creation” when describing the ONA tools used by “knowledge” disciplines:

ONA is basically an Object-Oriented model of an organization with objects such as people, teams, and technologies interlinked sending messages to each other and invoking their respective methods to accomplish the goals of the firm. (2 of 10)

This “objectification” (and I don’t mean to co-opt or confuse that term) allows Krebs (and Cross and Morville) to discuss social networks and the analysis thereof in terms of improvement and increased productivity. As objects within a diagram, an isolated or removed employee can be viewed as a failed product, which allows the analyst to focus on the process or system that allowed the failure to occur in the first place. The analysis assumes that by providing access to the appropriate objects within the network(s), a failed product (a net negative producer) can be transformed into a net positive producer.

What I’m seeing in our readings (and especially from Krebs) is an emphasis on information engineering methodologies and not enough emaphsis on the "social" aspects of Social Network Analysis. While all three authors we’ve read seem to claim otherwise, I see a heavy emphasis on information as a corporate asset and as the critical component of SNA and network(s) redesign (redesign which is based on the results of the analysis). It just looks too much like structural analysis with the addition of object (or entity)-relationship diagrams. In some ways this emphasis isn’t (or shouldn’t be surprising), as it is an outgrowth of object-oriented design and development methodologies, which encapsulate data and functions together in reusable objects. Instead of looking at a person’s function within the organization (and decomposing that function—procedural abstraction), SNA’s application of OO methodologies allows for a person’s (an object’s) function to be generalized and the network to be described as a “whole-part” structure.

In the introduction to Knowledge Networks, Krebs notes that some consultants emphasize the soft-side of knowledge management—the side that rewards knowledge sharing. It seems to me that the value in “soft-side” analysis is its recognition of the human element of the network—of the behaviors that need to be modified to improve knowledge creation and sharing—and of the fact that employees aren’t interchangeable objects that respond to knowledge/information/data connections in a consistent and predictable way.