On the drawing board

The challenge

As the global economy increasingly tilts toward knowledge-based wealth production, companies are finding that it usually takes a combination of people and their individual knowledge reservoirs to solve increasingly complex business problems. The result is that the degree to which a company's culture encourages information sharing can often play a significant role in its productivity. But businesses often find that the connections between the people who possess the knowledge essential to completing an assignment are informal and evolve through social networking rather than externally imposed organizational hierarchy.

Identifying new strategies for managing those hidden connections among knowledge workers has been problematic because businesses have lacked the tools for measuring and quantifying human interactions. And while a conventional supply chain can be tweaked to improve efficiency, a knowledge supply chain composed of human links is much more difficult to manipulate. Skill taxonomies may provide some useful data for short-term planning, but they fail to capture the full picture of a worker's capabilities, much less his or her potential. Adding to the complexity of the problem is companies' reliance on cross-functional teamwork and multitasking, which yield nonlinear data that is difficult to quantify.

The approach

To assist companies in uncovering the hidden connections that drive their ability to get work done, IBM Research Services – a partnership between IBM Research and IBM Global Business Services – offers a social network analysis (SNA) service designed to help reveal a multitude of underlying personnel issues, such as where collaboration falls apart, where talent and expertise could be better used, where decision-making gets bogged down, and where opportunities for innovation are being lost. Included in the analysis are data derived from social computing activities, such as e-mail, instant messaging, wiki and blog participation and browser analyzers.

Once an SNA has been performed, the resulting information can be used with mathematical algorithms that help solve optimization problems related to information and communication networks of people, as well as the business processes in which they are embedded. Thus, while SNA can pinpoint problems and improvement opportunities, social network optimization (SNO) provides decision support for what to do next.

For example, using SNO can help provide a company attempting to assimilate employees acquired through a merger with a plan for allocating limited resources to improve the connectivity between the two groups. Or when a new, high-level manager is brought in, SNO can help identify ways to connect him or her to the existing network of workers. Similarly, when the SNA results indicate that one employee is "overly connected," acting as the focal point for communications between a number of groups, SNO can help identify ways to make the organization more robust by identifying and promoting new communications channels among workers.

Next steps

With the rise of social networks and the proliferation of knowledge work, IBM is well positioned to offer its SNO expertise to a variety of clients, including businesses and government agencies. For instance, the speed with which any potential outbreaks of infectious disease could spread throughout communities requires a specialized approach toward monitoring events that could alert healthcare authorities to the problem as soon as possible. The IBM SNO tool could be used to provide a sense and respond optimization solution that would help give government agencies and healthcare providers an "early warning" based on k-shortest paths to disease transmission. And in an era when companies are experimenting with viral marketing as an alternative means of disseminating their messages and attracting customers, businesses could use SNO to help target these hidden communities in a highly cost efficient and effective manner.

For more information on engaging IBM expertise in social network optimization to help improve your corporate environment, contact IBM Research Services today.