Organization Network Analysis

An X-ray into the inner working of organization and unleash social capital

Why

In an organization, people built informal "go-to" networks and teams. They rely on that one person for knowledge in a certain area of expertise. They reach out to a particular person if they are interested to know the latest news and gossips in the company. These spontaneous, critically important connections are the lifeblood of organizations worldwide. If we can go beyond the org. chart and have a visualization of both formal and informal relationships in an organization, we can

Accelerate change management and cultural transformation by maximizing organic exchange of information
Increase operational effectiveness with organizational design that position employees where they can deliver the most impact
Gain role and functional clarity to ensure the right talents are engaged in the system
Facilitate knowledge management and transfer by identifying internal expert and building community
And more...

What

Organization Network Analysis (ONA) provides a new lens to evaluate how people interact and show up in an organization. By having a targeted group to fill in a short survey followed by network analysis, we can visualize the inner workings of an organization, making the invisible patterns of collaboration, trust, information flow, decision making and so forth visible for evidence-based decision making. Compare to other typical data analytics methods, it adds the dynamic of "social capital" to static "human capital" data which makes it valuable for the organization. After all, employee value not only depends on "human capital" (i.e. traits, skillsets) but also "social capital" (i.e. relationship, network).

How

Kumu, a cloud-based platform is one of the tools that can perform ONA. In the below, I will illustrate how Kumu can be used to analyze network data. For the dataset, I have used Harry Potter network data provided by efekarakus here.

You are recommended to use a laptop to view the below map for a better user experience.

The above ONA map illustrates the connection of characters in the Harry Potter Universe. In ONA, every node represents an individual while the edge represents the connection. The edges are currently colored based on their relationship, in which blue edge resembles an ally while red edge resembles an enemy. Meanwhile, the nodes are sized by degree centrality, the larger the node, the more connected s/he is in the network.

Taking Harry Potter's ONA Map as an example, we can

Identify who are the key influencers in the system
Understand the relationships among the characters
Explore individual's ally/enemy network as well as emerging communities and group

Imagine we have a customized survey to collect network data in an organization, we can explore and visualize patterns of your interest with corresponding questions, for example,

Collaboration - How often have you interacted with the following colleagues?
Knowledge Transfer- How likely would you seek help from the following colleagues on this area of expertise?
Trust- How comfortable are you to show your vulnerability to the following colleagues?

Together with the demographics data (i.e. function, level), we can have a very rich and fruitful analysis to provide unparalleled insights that are relevant for the business needs.