Professor Carley, as well as a frequent correspondent who I will identify
only as the director of KM at an AmLaw 100 firm, have come through. First,
Professor Carley provided a working
paper on the Enron email database, and told me that under the auspices
of her position as director of the "Computational Analysis of Social
and Organizational Systems" center the
use and application of organizational network analysis tools is taught.
Second, my loyal reader pointed me towards the work of Rob Cross,
a professor at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce
(associated with the more familiar Darden school), who provides a handy-dandy summary
of what one can learn about, and how one can improve, organizational
dynamics through "making
invisible patterns of information flow and collaboration in strategically
important groups visible."
Let’s dimensionalize this, folks, with a real-world case from Prof.
Cross’s practice: A large consulting firm reorganized
into four regions across the US from its earlier city-by-city structure,
with the goal of being able to provide a broader and more diverse array
of services to each client. Eighteen months later, the question
senior executives wanted answered was, how is the integration going? Using
organizational network analysis ("ONA"), they produced the following
graphic representing the relationships across two of the new regions:
Any questions about which region had become more cohesive
and which remained silo’ed in its earlier city by city footprint?
So what’s in ONA for you? Does integrating practice
groups sound like a challenge you’ve ever faced? And did you
try to address it through exhortation and evangelism? We can
do better: The tools are there for you to use, and they work.
