Complexity and Social Networks Blog

« April 2007 | Main | June 2007 »

25 May 2007

Notes on government CRM - Citizen Relationship Management

While CRM has been researched and applied in private enterprises for years, it has only recently gained attention as a concept for government. Concurrent with the emergence of eGovernment and the general tendency of transferring more and more business concepts into the government domain, articles and studies started to address the topic. Many articles on eGovernment briefly address CRM when referring to aspects such as one-stop government or a multi-channel environment directly or indirectly. Besides CRM, authors introduce slightly altered terms like Citizen Relationship Management (CiRM), Constituent Relationship Management (CRM), Public Relationship Management (PRM) or Citizen Encounter and Relationship Management (CERM) to underline its government orientation and application.

Private sector CRM literature is highly fragmented and lacks a common conceptualization (Zablah/Bellenger/Johnston 2004). It is, therefore, somewhat unsurprising to find the same characteristics in its application to government. Truly sarcastic oberserves might say "garbage in, garbage out". The literature on CiRM currently lacks a common definition, conceptualization and set of goals. I define Citizen Relationship Management (CiRM) as,

a strategy and set of management practices, enabled by technology with a broad citizen focus, to maintain and optimize relationships and encourage new forms of citizen participation.

Most articles on CiRM review private sector CRM, technological aspects (CRM systems) and expected benefits in government. There is a general agreement that many aspects of CRM are not sector-specific. However, they need to be translated into the context of each sector. Customer segmentation can serve administrators to identify those needing help or who are about to do so. Customer retention strategies can be directed at preventing citizen’s from using a service again. Yet, the termination of unprofitable customers, data mining, broadening the service range and thus choice, the issue of externalities or conceptualizing the citizen as customer are believed to be harder to transfer to government.

Another issue is that term CiRM is applied to describe any citizen-focused initiative or interaction. For instance, public service provision through an online portals are presented as successful CiRM projects. Administrators struggle with the lack of knowledge on CRM, in addition to their discomfort with CRM terminology. Public administrations, which claim to engage in CiRM, connect it to single customer service initiatives, online portals, electronic case management, call centers, physical one-stop service centers and CRM software. However, the literature offers little to no insights into organizational, cultural or process related changes in CiRM initiatives in terms of a holistic understanding of CRM.

King (2007) analyzed the results of the British CRM Pathfinder program (2001-02) and the CRM National Programme (2003-04). The majority of CRM projects focussed on adding CRM capabilities to call centers and one-stop shops. Participating municipalities can be in different stages of a proposed CRM development path which do not build upon each other. Therefore, a contact center and multi-channel environment may be realized without the changes towards a customer centric organization. In addition, there was little evidence for citizen analytics (segmentation, needs analysis), organizational changes (bridging departmental silos) or true multi-channel access. Janssen and Wagenaar (2002) found similar results and concluded that Dutch CiRM efforts are in an “embryonic stage”. Along these lines, in their survey of the status quo of CRM in German public administration, Bauer, Grether and Richter (2002) reported that the CRM elements implemented are far from meeting the holistic concept of CRM. Per-sonalization and a closer analysis of commonly used public services are frequent practices, while segmentation or profitability analyses remain untested concepts. Among the biggest barri-ers to exploring CRM, German administrations mention their lack of human resources and time constraints. In the United States, CiRM is mostly connected to 311 non-emergency number call center initiatives and innovations such as the performance management concept CITISTAT.

Based on some of these facts, I strongly recommend making sure to come up with a clear definition and concept of CiRM before communicating it throughout the organization and attempting an implementation.CiRM is more than a contact center and it is also different to eGovernment although both can certainly enrich each other.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)

22 May 2007

Connections: The Nature of Networks New Science Exhibition, NY Hall of Science

The New York Hall of Science is the host of the 2007 NetSci conference and has also an ongoing exhibition on social networks. It shows kids hands on how social networks are established or fall apart.

It’s a very cool exhibition: the creator Stephen Uzzo has just walked us through it without explaining the different parts. Everyone had to experience for themselves how connections on the Internet are created for example, how a hub connects to the closest spokes around him (we were all standing on a light show type of board, where each of us was a node and when you move around the connections are changing, depending on the shortest path). There were also real spiders creating a spider web.

I will add more on this during the conference and hopefully some pictures...

Posted by Ines Mergel at 6:54 PM | Comments (0)

21 May 2007

Networking (Social) Science Networks

During the last three weeks, I have attended two different conferences - both focused entirely on (Social) Networks: First, I went to Greece to attend the International Conference for Social Network Analysts (main audience/attendance: social scientists) and I am currently blogging from the NetScience conference in New York in the Hall of Science (main audience: scientists).

I talked to a lot of people and listened to a lot of talks at both conferences and I noticed a couple of interesting things:

1. Researchers in all fields, natural and social sciences are working on (social) networks and within their specific fields they are located in a very specific niche within their own discipline. This is reflected for example in the fact, that a lot of researchers feel obligated to explain what a social network is and what the definition of concepts such as centrality are.

2. The basic concepts and analysis methods are the same across all disciplines, but we all use different language to describe what we are doing.

3. Researchers in different fields have different needs for analyzing and visualizing their network data and those who have the abilities to do so are creating/programming their own visualization and analysis tools or libraries. This seems to be an exploding area and I see a potential to synchronize the different needs and tools across disciplines.

4. Academic disciplines on (social) network research are largely disconnected and innovation is occurring within the disciplines, but usually not across disciplines. It seems as if the wheel is reinvented, but because academic disciplines are isolated and siloed the overall network science field is extremely innovative for its specific audiences.

Posted by Ines Mergel at 5:08 PM | Comments (0)

Brokerage vs. Cohesion: How Social Network Structure Could Influence Doping Investigations

The exclusion of Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso, two of the top favorites for the Tour de France 2006 victory, from the race one day prior to its start shook the professional bicycle racing scene. Both riders have been and still are suspected to have been part of the doping network of the Spanish physician Eufemiano Fuentes. Almost one year later, observers, lawyers, and journalists are still trying to shed light into the activities within the latter network. However, very few results have been achieved until today. From a network research standpoint, one could ask the question why is it so difficult to get access to information in this case?

From a structural social network perspective, two answers appear worthwhile giving some more thoughts
(1) Cohesion-Argument: In professional bicycle racing, everybody knows that everybody else is using to gain or maintain performance during bicycle races. According to Coleman's social capital argument this would mean that everybody in the community of professional racers expects from everybody else not to say a word of what is going on. Such collective action of keeping everything secret thus hinders observers to shed more light into this situation.

(2) Brokerage-Argument: Nobody in the scene knows what other riders are doing do gain or maintain race performance. Only a few key people - brokers such as the physician Eufemiano Fuentes - are aware of what is going on. In this case, only these key people or gatekeepers might provide a potential pathway to more information on what is going on in the scene. In this scenario, riders will not offer any insights into potential doping network as long as they consider their careers as threatened.

It will be interesting to see how this story evolves and which of the two scenarios might hold at the end.

Posted by Thomas Langenberg at 8:00 AM | Comments (0)

20 May 2007

Effect of Network Structure on Consensus

I was struck by a presentation by Qiming Lu at the NetSci conference on the dramatic effect of the micro-structure of social networks on consensus formation. Essentially, the results showed that creating random graphs with the same macro properties (clustering coefficient, characteristic path length, etc.) yielded vast differences in the final consensus state of a social network in an opinion spreading simulation.

Lu used social ties between actors to denote influences that individuals have on each other, with actors having certain probabilities of changing their opinion based on their neighbors' states and their current state. In the study, the authors randomly assigned individuals to start with different words for a single concept (called the naming game) to see how many words would exist in the steady state of the system.

In simulations on real world network structures, the authors found that actors would converge to using two words to describe a common concept, while replicating the same macro properties on a random graph yielded a consensus on one word. This has tremendous implications for how we characterize networks, since it points to a lack of a measure to capture certain features of naturally formed networks.

This also leads us to think about how we can combat groupthink, since these results imply that some larger social structures may exhibit some resistance towards groupthink. It is important to isolate these factors so that we can design our organizations and meetings to take advantage of these natural characteristics. Of course we do not randomly start with opinions, but form them over time as a function of those around us. However, these results may strengthen the notion that independent opinion formation followed by social discussion effectively combats groupthink, as has been previously demonstrated in smaller systems.

They have presented some of their results previously, in the paper Dynamics of Naming Games in Random Geometric Networks, but their NetSci paper will hopefully be available online soon.

Posted by Ben Waber at 2:25 PM | Comments (0)

17 May 2007

Watts to Yahoo

Notable news in the world of social network research, that Duncan Watts is being hired away from Columbia University by Yahoo.

Duncan Watts, by the by, is a two time speaker on the Cambridge Colloquium on Complexity and Social Networks, and, of course, the Watts of Watts and Strogatz (1998), which marked the beginning of the current era of research on networks by physicists, mathematicians, and the like.

I am not sure what were the key factors in this move, but it is surely notable that one of the "rock stars" of the field is leaving academia. Three obvious potential factors are: (1) the substantial availability of resources in the private sector in this area at this time; (2) the access to proprietary data; and (3) an institutional milieu (at least at Yahoo and Google) more encouraging of cross-boundary innovation than much of academia.

Is this a blip or a wake up call to the academy? I will revisit in a year or so....

D. J. Watts and S. H. Strogatz. Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks, Nature, 393:440-442 (1998).

Posted by David Lazer at 7:49 PM | Comments (1)

14 May 2007

Using the Internet to Create a New Labor Movement: U.S., U.K., and Harvard Experiences

This is an abstract of todays PNG/CCCSN seminar with Richard B. Freeman (Harvard University). We encourage you to discuss his presentation via comments on the blog.

"With trade union membership falling relative to the work force, many workers cannot readily obtain the services that unions traditionally provided, ranging from information about their employer and the job market more broadly to representation in dealing with individual and collective problems that invariably arise at workplaces. This talk describes how unions and other worker organizations have used the Internet to provide some of these services, even in the face of employer opposition to traditional unionism. The US experience ranges from WorkingAmerica, which has quietly enlisted about 1.6 million members to reedyassociates.com, which pressured law firms to raise pay by informing law graduates about economic differences. The UK experience includes union provision of information to nonunion workers and a discussion board network for worker representatives. Harvard offers the worklifewizard,which provides information and answers work-related questions. I consider the extent to which these innovative uses of the Internet can create a new labor movement, better suited to the modern work force."

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 1:19 PM | Comments (0)

11 May 2007

Social network website reaches a hire level: LinkedIn uses its own who-knows-whom tools to recruit a CEO.

This story (excerpts below) has a nice, recursive, quality.

Social network website reaches a hire level
LinkedIn uses its own who-knows-whom tools to recruit a CEO.
By Alex Pham, Times Staff Writer
May 7, 2007

Dan Nye landed a job as chief executive of a hot Silicon Valley company without even dusting off his resume.
....
Nye was an executive vice president at Advent Software Inc. when Reid Hoffman, chairman of social-networking company LinkedIn Corp., came calling. Hoffman hadn't found him through a headhunter or a classifieds site but through LinkedIn's vast who-knows-whom online network.
,,,
Hoffman had been looking for someone to run the Palo Alto company he founded, which is like MySpace.com for professionals — people can fill out profile pages, then connect for sales leads, expertise or job prospects. A venture capitalist he knew recommended Nye.
...
Not until after he was hired did Nye discover that Hoffman had made dozens of reference checks — without asking Nye for a single name. He found them through LinkedIn.

All Hoffman had needed were the names of the companies where Nye had worked and the years he was there. Hoffman ran that information through LinkedIn's member profiles, finding dozens of people who had overlapped with the prospective hire (members can also search by college attended and by job title). He fired off e-mails and phone calls to numerous people and talked extensively with 27 of Nye's former colleagues.
...
As he weighed the job, Nye turned the tables on his recruiters. He studied up on LinkedIn through its own online tools.

"I was trying to decide whether I wanted to be part of this company," he said.
...
"We now live in a world where it's just not hard to find out about people," [Nye] said.

Posted by David Lazer at 11:50 AM | Comments (2)

9 May 2007

The winners of the "Competition on visualizing network dynamics”

The winning entries of the Netsci “Competition on visualizing network dynamics” are posted here. The winning entry, by Aaron Koblin of UCLA, is a representation of flight data from the FAA. It is truly stunning in its elegance and beauty—something that even non network types would enjoy watching.

There are many worthy runner-ups. One I would highlight is the entry by Bender-deMoll, McFarland, and Moody, which shows the interactions patterns within a classroom, using the network visualization software SoNIA. It was particularly powerful, I think, in conveying the importance of timing and sequence in a communication network.

Posted by David Lazer at 9:46 PM | Comments (1)

8 May 2007

EU policy: Can Social Software facilitate the inclusion of immigrants and minorities?

Today's blog entry raises the question to our readers how social software could facilitate the inclusion of immigrants and minorities. Furthermore, there is a link to two post-doc positions.

I recently attended a EU policy finding workshop which aimed to contribute ideas and suggestions drawn from social capital and ICT (Web20, social software) perspective to the preparation process of the EC Communication (2007) and subsequent Initiative (2008) on eInclusion within the i2010 framework initiative. The Riga Ministerial Declaration dentified the participation by immigrants and ethnic minorities (IEM) in the European information society as important to improve their possibilities for economic and social participation and integration, creativity and entrepreneurship. Greater employability and productivity of minorities are specifically mentioned as a target, for which tailored ICT training and support actions are deemed to be important.

The following questions guided our discussions during the workshop which I would like to post here to collect further ideas and suggestions:

- Under which conditions can social capital be used as a lever to counter a number of risks of digital exclusion and to exploit ICT-enabled opportunities to promote greater socio-economic integration and cultural diversity?

- Which contribution especially in a social capital enhancing perspective, can new ICT applications and services (particularly mobile phone and social computing) make to address crucial integration challenges, on the one hand, and to support the creative and entrepreneurial usage of ICT by IEM, on the other?

- Which kind of instruments can the European Commission mobilise to enhance social capital and its cohesive effects through the use ICT? How should innovation and research agendas be inspired to respond to the considered challenges? How successful experiences can be best replicated?

Accordingly, recommendations were structured around the following areas: deepening understanding, research and innnovation, cooperation, awareness & marketing, good practice promotion, monitoring and benachmaring, legislative action and finally provision of "public" services. Now its your turn. One example for an "immigrant" oriented website was a project in the Netherlands for Moroccans.

Besides your comments to this blog you can also go directly to the eInclusion of immigrants and minorities project website and gather more information or share your ideas.

There are also two post-doc positions available at IPTS in lovely Seville, Spain. The Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) is one of the seven scientific institutes of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) so you should work in a very interesting environment. Paul Timmers who is leading the project was the former head of the EU eGovernment Unit. If you are interested in investigating, from a technological and socio-economic point of view, the future of eServices and Web 2.0 technologies, and have knowledge in one or several of the following research lines: eInclusion, eLearning, eGovernment and eHealth you should send them your CV by no later than May 25.!

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 12:00 AM | Comments (1)

7 May 2007

Life in the Network: The Coming Era of Computational Social Science

I will be giving a talk today as part of the Cambridge Colloquium on Complexity and Social Networks titled: “Life in the Network: The Coming Era of Computational Social Science.”

My key assertions (following from themes I have touched on in this blog) are that:

1) An increasing fraction of human behavior (especially relational behavior) leaves substantial digital traces—whether in the form of phone logs, e-mail, instant messaging, etc. (See Ben Waber’s recent post on the netgov blog on the instrumentation of human behavior.)

2) Increased computational power allows the analysis of these digital traces—e.g., through natural language processing, statistical analysis of massive (millions of individuals) longitudinal data, etc.

3) The preceding two points suggest (I argue) that we are on the precipice of dramatic new insights into collective human behavior. I say that noting that it is not inevitable that those insights will be produced. Human institutions tend to be fairly conservative. Will the relevant data become openly available for research? Can we work across the silo’s, which this work would require? Can we build the infrastructure to facilitate the types of collaborations and capacities needed?

In any case, I will be talking about this, with illustrations from four ongoing projects, today, 12:00-1:30, in the Fainsod room at the Kennedy School, Harvard.

Posted by David Lazer at 9:00 AM | Comments (1)

Networked Publics

Mimi Ito has recently posted a draft of her introductory chapter for Networked Publics, a forthcoming edited volume published by MIT Press. The chapter outlines in broad strokes a number of factors that have enabled the growing popularity of new forms of online scalability, such as photo sharing, blogs, and online games. Although its brevity may be a source of criticism, it is a refreshing change from the largely atheoretical discussion of these emerging online activities commonly found in the news or occasionally in scholarly journals.

Posted by Jeff Boase at 3:04 AM | Comments (0)

6 May 2007

Clinton v Obama: battle of the fund raising networks

Interesting article in today's Boston Globe about the competition for dollars between Obama and Clinton in Massachusetts. Of particular relevance to this blog is the following quote:

"You don't give to causes, you give to friends," said mystery writer Robert Parker of Cambridge, who contributed $4,600 to Obama. "Larry Tribe asked me to contribute to Obama, and so I did." But Parker added that while he would like to see Obama win the nomination, "I'm not an enthusiastic political supporter of anyone."

This highlights the fact that contributions are, in part, mobilized through social networks of like-minded people. It would be interesting to examine the contribution data as 2-mode network data (candidates x contributors) to see (1) how contributors are connected; and (2) how candidates over time are linked to each other through their contributors.

Posted by David Lazer at 8:44 PM | Comments (1)

Wayne Baker on Social Capital and Generalized Reciprocity

Last week Wayne E. Baker of the University of Michigan spoke on "Social Capital and Generalized Reciprocity". This is a belated entry to request reactions to the talk and topic. Here is the abstract he provided for the talk:

"Reciprocity is a human universal. It is the engine of social capital in groups, organizations, and communities. I present results from three pilot studies of generalized reciprocity in organizational settings. Using the Reciprocity Ring™ to collect data on generalized reciprocity, I explore three topics: network evolution, values and positive mood, and the role of pre-existing networks."

Let me briefly elaborate. The key question about reciprocity explored in the talk was why A helps B given that B may not be in a position to help A in the future. Prof. Baker has developed a particular research paradigm (the “Reciprocity Ring”_, in which a group is told to ask for and give help (on anything), where the empirical puzzle is what drives some people to be more helpful than others. In any case, if you were at the talk and reactions to his presentation, or if you had comments about the drivers of “generalized reciprocity,” so defined, please comment here.

Posted by David Lazer at 3:26 PM | Comments (1)

3 May 2007

Automatically Sensing Social Networks

My group at the MIT Media Lab has started conducting experiments using the Sociometric Badge, a sensing platform that logs voice features, proximity to other individuals, face-to-face interactions, and movement. We have finished analysis of data obtained in a preliminary study at a German bank’s marketing division, and the results were astonishing. We were also fortunate enough to get the e-mail logs for the bank over the course of the study.

For years e-mail data has been used as an easy to obtain proxy for social network information. We found, however, that in fact proximity is highly negatively correlated with e-mail use. We can attribute this to several factors. First, if you are in close proximity to another individual, it makes more sense to interact with them in the real world rather than send them an e-mail. Second, proximity information also picks up on informal relations, while in this particular organization e-mail is used mainly for business purposes. This is because if you spend a lot of time with someone you are more likely to be their friend and therefore less likely to send an e-mail to them. This result points towards the necessity of having face-to-face interaction information in order to have a full view of the social network.

When we combined face-to-face interaction information (which we used to create a social network representation) with e-mail data we got a more complete view of the social network that exhibited some interesting properties. Most notably, betweenness in the social network and total communication were both highly negatively correlated with the perceived quality of interactions. These two measures, however, were not significantly correlated with each other. This points to the necessity of aiding central actors in managing their interaction-related stress, since it is evident that those who are overburdened with their communication responsibilities feel that their interaction quality similarly degrades.

These results strongly argue for the use of automatic sensing data for computational social science. We report many other interesting findings in a paper that will appear in the NetSci 2007 conference.

Posted by Ben Waber at 10:18 AM | Comments (2)