Who Knows Whom, and Who Knows What?

Social network analysis provides a clear picture of the ways that far-flung employees and divisions are working together, and can help companies identify key experts in the organization.

Comments

Finding the Gaps

SNA can also make the lack of connections (or collaboration) painfully clear. Two years ago, IT executives at MWH Global looked around at their sprawling, decentralized company and knew they had to make some changes. Over the years, the Denver-based company had expanded through mergers to include 6000 employees and 150 offices worldwide. Three separate IT organizations worked in different locations in groups dedicated to ERP, IT infrastructure and other large projects. The company decided to reorganize so that all 160 IT employees dedicated to servicing the company's internal IT needs reported to one location. The goal was to break down the silos and get people in Europe, Asia and the Americas talking to each other to improve service and create efficiencies.

But before this reorganization, Gulas, who spearheaded the IT centralization plan, decided to run an SNA to see how the groups were connected. The SNA was completed in September 2003, and the results, he says, clearly showed how the ERP group was cut off from the rest of IT, working in almost complete isolation. The analysis found that there was more collaboration between IT staff in Europe and Asia than within the 20-person ERP division. And because of this isolation, he says, there was little collaboration with users of the ERP software, and the ERP group got a reputation of being hard to work with. "People sometimes don't believe that they are disconnected from the rest of the organization, but in our case, a picture spoke a thousand words," Gulas says.

According to Cross, who helped Gulas map his social network with Web-based software, the technique can help companies such as MWH Global get a sense of who is best connected in the enterprise, as well as who is most overloaded. The results can be surprising. "People are finding disconnects across functional lines, physical distance and even between people working on key projects," says Cross, who is also co-author of The Hidden Power of Social Networks. Some of these are to be expected, but others can cause real damage to an organization.

At Mars, the SNA project uncovered a lack of good communication between the snack food division in New Jersey and the food division in Los Angeles. "We found very few bridges between the two groups, and that lack of communication was leading to duplication of efforts in some areas," says Caroline Ruzicka, who was then group research and development manager for Masterfoods USA, a division of Mars, and has since left the company. Clear evidence of this lack of communication also spurred company efforts to fix the problem. Now, employees are expected to keep in touch with certain colleagues, and their performance reviews are based in part on successful networking.

Gulas has also taken steps to correct the problems highlighted by his SNA. Motivated in part by the disconnects it saw on the SNA diagrams, MWH has a plan to reorganize around functional groups instead of regional teams. For example, the company used to have people around the globe working on messaging technologies such as Lotus Domino. But these people were often working independently, with little knowledge of what their counterparts in other countries were doing. Now, there is a single manager overseeing the domain, directing the efforts on a worldwide basis.

In order to improve communication in the ERP group, MWH decided to break up the California-based team. The company was in the midst of upgrading the JD Edwards software and saw an opportunity to create cross-functional teams, combining people from ERP and other parts of IT, in order to break down barriers. Some of the ERP team members were assigned to the large upgrade project, which also included IT staff from other divisions.

A year after the first SNA, Gulas decided to complete another analysis to measure where progress had been made. The results showed that connectedness and communication improved in the IT group and that "more people knew who was doing what". What's more, the first SNA showed that average IT employees knew 29 people in the organization, while the second showed they knew 39.

As a result of the SNAs, Gulas has helped organize team-building sessions that brought people together from Europe and other parts of the organization who had never met before. He has used the SNA data to identify "strategic knowledge communities" in project management and client service management, which were largely unknown to senior staff. Gulas says his group is performing better after the SNA, and this improved collaboration has contributed to cost savings of about 8 percent. "It's an important tool to help us make sure that people are talking to each other," he says.