I’ve been connecting with Robin Athey this week. She’s one of the SNA network (KM cluster, Network Roundtable). Her current focus is on talent management, and she’s just published with Deloitte the first in a series of articles on the topic. This first one, It’s 2008: Do you Know Where Your Talent Is? presents the framework that extends the usual HR hiring and retention processes to a more holistic set of practices that include developin, deploying, and connecting individuals in a way that meets their top criteria for job satisfaction:

• Doing work that engages them
• Learning how to do it better,
• Encountering fresh challenges,
• Interacting with people in positive ways

She (naturally) emphasizes the importance of the task of keeping people connected and ensuring that their personal networks are healthy and brings in good references to the network research that correlates job performance with good social capital. It’s really good to see the understanding of social networks coming into more and more organizational research and practice.