sla2006: Net Work Net Work:  The new leadership challenge
By Patti Anklam (6/14, 9:15am)

Strong networks are correlated with health (personal – better health, companies – “more flexible, adaptive and resilient”)

Social capital – stock of connections, trust, shared values/behaviors (from Prusak & Cohen, In Good Company)

Overview of a few types of maps connections based on intangible deliverables, communication, other visualizations like those from inxight.

Any set of relationships is a network (person – person, group - group, information artifacts)

Typical patterns (and what do they mean for knowledge in the organization)

• silos or stovepipes


• isolated clusters


• highly central people or functions


• marginalized voices


• external connectivity


• distinct roles and influence

Cross & Parker Hidden Power of Social Networks (standard hierarchical rules vs. who really talks to whom)

Why should leaders pay attention

• learn about internal networks and how company works


• between orgs


• personal network


• training staff to network and work collaboratively

Why do ONA – organizational network analysis

• allows managers to target disconnects


• understand who’s key


• people do information seeking from other people first and only to “external” sources 15% of the time

How do you do ONA

• start with a business objective (can you do anything with it?  See “reasons for an x-ray”  Business Week, 2/27/2006)


• design the project (boundaries, what do you want to know about the network, who are the stakeholders, collaborative capacity of the organization and potential for innovation (assuming collaboration correlates with innovation?))


• relationships revealing collaborative capacity (what questions reveal what info)


• ready the organization (is there trust and transparency, will people be honest)


• conduct survey (shouldn’t it be more ethnographic or interviewing? Hm, they put everyone’s name in and ask for each person what the participants think of them… for up to 150-200 people?!?)


• review the results (UCInet)


• explore metrics (structural vs. centrality)


• metrics that reveal the structure of the whole and cross-boundary (connect numbers, density, etc., to what’s going on in the organization)


• leadership, individual roles


• validate results (surprises?  Does it make sense?)


• what-if, simulation of network w/out key players


• figure out what action to take (“interventions”?)


• follow-up

Ways to do a larger org

• can do her method systematically over time (groups of 100 at a time or something, business groups at a time)


• can do by proxy – a representative person from each group who answers for the group


• other projects are doing things like e-mail but always have to take into account ethics, organizational view toward transparency.  Can also take into account e-mail content to get rid of personal (non work) messages and what people are collaborating on

Governing by Network:  The New Shape of the Public Sector by Stephen and William D. Eggers (network stuff in gov’t)

How to build networks?

• purpose, policies, leadership (actually very similar to Preece’s suggestions for sociability and usability in online communities)


• allow for flexibility, growth


• plan for evaluation/assessment

sla2006  ¶ 11:07 AM| |cites (technorati) |