Article Pointer from Nature!
This link (above will take you to the PDF file on HP's Social Network analytics as describd below.
The whole email thing is interesting, but raises a few questions - two interesting data points. First is a lecture I went to by Mark Albion (former HBS professor and author of Making a Life amaking a Living). Who described how after he left harvard, his network was gone. That is no-one returned calls, no one would do favors, etc. He had to form entirely new networks once his Harvard B-School professor authority had disappeared.
Similarly I am watching the email of my wife - who was at Palm Computing, diminish dramatically. In fact she is amazing at forming relationships and has maintained relationships with people that she knew there, and continues email contact - although significantly less frequently. The comment from one of her former colleagues who also left was that his "Network" has been no help in landing a new position!
I guess my question focused on how one forms NEW NETWORKS. What investment is required here, and how and when do you salvage bits from your OLD NETWORKS. Software that analyzes existing networking behavior may not tell the individual much of any value (although it might be helpful to outsiders/consultants trying to solve organizational problems).
But strategies for forming new networks that are robust in the face of career and life changes - this is an important line of thought!!!!
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Want to know how your organization really works - who speaks to whom, who holds the power? Then study the flow of internal e-mail, say scientists at global technology firm Hewlett-Packard.
The researchers have developed a way to use e-mail exchanges to build a map of the structure of an organization. The map shows the teams in which people actually work, as opposed to those they are assigned to.
The technique can also reveal who is at the heart of each sub-group. These people often correspond with company-designated leaders such as project managers. But unofficial de facto leaders can also emerge. The approach might even help to pinpoint the heads of criminal or terrorist networks.
Communities of practice
It has long been recognized that big institutions tend to divide organically into informal collaborative networks, called communities of practice.
For example, colleagues in one department might all tend to consult one particularly useful person in another department, linking the group into a community of practice. Such collaborations are very common in scientific research. Groups in different universities share information, skills and expertise to solve problems.
But communities of practice are difficult to identify - the process typically involves laborious interviews and surveys.
E-mail, however, leaves a robust trace of the interactions between two people. If you want to know what they said, privacy issues could pose obstacles. But simply to know that they communicate, all you need are the names of the sender and the recipient, say Joshua Tyler and colleagues at Hewlett-Packard's labs in Palo Alto, California.
Tyler's group uses this information to construct a communications graph in which lines - each denoting a direct e-mail exchange - link nodes that correspond to individuals. Next the researchers use a computer to search for links with high 'betweenness'. These are the few connections between groups of highly connected nodes. Removing them decomposes the graph into a collection of isolated clusters of nodes, which correspond to the communities.
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Big institutions tend to divide organically into informal collaborative networks | | |
There are several tricks to this reduction process. For example, taking out one link alters the others' betweenness, which must be recalculated at each step. And the process has to stop before the communities themselves get fragmented.
Tyler and colleagues tested their community-finding algorithm on a set of nearly 200,000 e-mails exchanged between 485 employees of the Hewlett-Packard labs over three months.
The graph created from this data is a 'small world' - any node can be reached from any other by just a few steps.
The researchers found 66 communities. They asked 16 employees how well the method had identified their community of practice. Most responded along the lines of "yes, that's pretty much our project team", even though the communities often crossed the formal departmental boundaries defined by the company.
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