Blogs made it big in Business Week last fall. Now the time has come for a turn for social networking analysis (SNA). In the article, The Office Chart That Really Counts: Mapping informal relationships at a company is revealing -- and useful, Jena McGregor covers the space. My good friend Kate Ehrlich, at IBM, is interviewed along with a number of others.
Bruce Hoppe comments on the article in The Office Chart That Really Counts (Business Week). Bruce links to a prior post of his that Kate contributed to, Even with Web 2.0, we still occasionally need to meet face-to-face. The title is self-explanatory and one that I agree with with.
Bruce also links to a second Business Week article on SNA that is an interview of Kate, “IBM: Untangling Office Connections: Researcher Kate Ehrlich says companies can streamline innovation and collaboration through social-network analysis.” In this interview she offers some very practical advice on SNA and its value. If you make things visible then they become actionable. SNA helps with making things visible.
I only caution that this does not mean that the analysis is always right but at least there is a starting point for discussion. Treat these network maps as symptoms that need to be confirmed by other means. Like a lot of tools that rely on group behavior, there are many ways that SNA might be manipulated but at least it tells you where to look.
SNA is not without its critics. In the spirit of equal time, here is a post by Noel Guinane, Social Network Analysis, that points out some of the potential weaknesses of SNA. There is a long section of comments by many people that I know and respect. Some are interesting point and counterpoint. I agree with the person who said that any system can be gamed, especialy those that rely on group participation. I see this all the time and that motivated my caution above to treat SNA results as symptoms.
Noel writes in response to one of the comments, "My objection to SNA as it is at the moment is that it contains within it too much potential for gaming the system, encouraging people to ingratiate themselves socially with the hubs and in so doing, turn themselves into hubs without necessarily having anything to offer the company. This is how politics works, not business."
This is true but it is also true for Google, Amazon, del.icio.uc, Digg, and most web 2,0 tools. But this does mean that they should not be used.
I have seen the politics Noel describes happen many times before SNA was ever created. SNA is not necessary to motivate this behavior nor should it be blamed for it. SNA might document it but then the hubs need to be evaluated for what they really contribute to the business and not simply to their own self promotion. Going back to Kate's point, it makes things visible and then they can become actionable. They action requires some intelligence as SNA does not perscribe the action, only the symptom.
This is a very interesting subject. I would like to ask, in reference to Kate Ehrlich's point that "it makes things visible and then they can become actionable." ... exactly what does Social Networking Analysis make visible and how is it useful to a business?
Is it just a popularity survey?
Posted by: Noel Guinane | February 22, 2006 at 05:07 PM
I think makes visble the communication patterns of the group studied. How those are interpreted is up to the intelligence of the researcher and likely requires additional probing. It could be a popularity rating as you suggest or something more meaningful. I see SNA as a starting point and not a final conclusion.
Posted by: Bill Ives | February 22, 2006 at 05:12 PM
Bill, I think it makes visible the communication patterns of a group only to the senior management team. Since it takes social popularity as its only defining characteristic - excluding what I think are more important factors when considering a person's worth; their character, judgment and accomplishments - how does it help a business to know who is talking to who and who likes who? It looks to me like a gossip mill that actively encourages internal politicking to flourish.
I'm not sure it is a good idea to mandate a set of collaborative behaviors and rate people based on their adherence to them while ignoring the real contribution they bring to a business, i.e. their character, experience and accomplishments.
As I'm often saying: the more of a stranglehold bureaucracy gets on people, the less people pay attention to the rules. The more micro-managed we are, the less the authority is respected. Not every aspect of our lives requires a policy manual.
Posted by: Noel Guinane | February 23, 2006 at 03:53 PM
Bill, apprecaite well organizaed blog always. Researcher at IBM Hursley Lab in UK did a interesting thing about visualizing social networks within IBM Blog communities.
They are trying to make results of SNA network more intuitive to the users. Hope you find this intereating too
http://eightbar.co.uk/2006/02/13/more-ibm-blog-visualisation/
Posted by: Tomoaki Sawada | March 06, 2006 at 11:49 PM
Thanks Tomoaki - Your blog looked very interesting. Another tool for looking at the networking between blogs is iQuest (https://www.iquestsolutions.net/index.html). They have a software suite that can “analyze anything with words or symbols – articles, web pages, reports, memos, e-mails, telephone call logs, transcripts, message boards, blogs, survey responses and more – to show who is talking to whom, what they talk about, when they talk and where those conversations are taking place.” It contains a very useful visualization capability that also shows these relationships over time. A while back they did a visualization of who links to my blog and who links to these linkers and I could watch a movie of how these patterns emerged over time.
Posted by: Bill Ives | March 07, 2006 at 11:14 AM
This not at all directly related to the subject discussed in this post. But interesting application, called Checkmates(Check your mates) as an example of mashup (wonder if I am using the term correctly)
Mobile Phone + People (Social) + Map
It is now being demonstrated at O'reilly Emerging Tech 2006 conference.
http://www.edho.com/blog/?p=142
http://www.elatable.com/blog/?p=15
http://www.chaddickerson.com/blog/2006/03/07/checkmates/
Enjoy
Posted by: Tomoaki Sawada | March 07, 2006 at 08:23 PM