Complexity and Social Networks Blog

I just came back from the three-day event (5/18-20) "ISPRAT 1st International Government CIO Knoweldge Exchange" in Washington, D.C. ISPRAT is a non-profit think tank based in Germany. The think tank's scope is on technology and innovation/trends in government and bridging the gap between disciplines. Thus ISPRAT's members come from industry, academia and government. Usually it organizes government CIO summits and government related studies in Germany. The U.S. event brought its activities to a new level. The underlying idea was to bring German/EU and U.S. government CIOs together to exchange ideas/experiences on current challenges and trends.

The first day was spent at CSC, Falls Church, VA, talking about identity management (linked to post @Shaping Network Society inspired by the movie "Beyond the shadow of a doubt"), privacy, trust and enterprise architecture (case stuides on MITA, IRS and DoE). Many might not be aware of it, but both areas - identity management and enterprise architecture - are fundamental to Government 2.0. A couple of former CIOs joined the discussion and offered their insights on issues such as cross-boundary collaboration: Dan Mintz (DoT), Pat Schambach (DHS) and Mark Kneidinger (NY, VA, DoS).

The morning of the second day we spent at the White House Conference Center. Officially Supported by GSA and the U.S. CIO Council , we had a couple of acting CIOs present to offer their insights in a roundtable discussion with German, Austrian and Mexican government executives. Unfortunately, Vivek Kundra couldn't come as he had to testify on Information Security on the hill. (Update 5/29: Read the Whitehouse Cyberspace Policy Review).Two take-aways. First, when talking about new collaboration tools, the CIOs admitted that it is quite a challenge to align social media with the existing laws and regulations--some dating back to the 70s--"they can get you fired, put you in jail or burden you with huge fines". Second, data.gov will go live on May 1st--it now is.

Using Cisco's telepresence center in Herndon, VA, the group--including gov execs sitting in Germany--exchanged thoughts with the Paul Cosgrave (NYC) and Teri Takai (California). It was the first time I participated in such a"video conference" (Cisco doesn't like that term) and I was amazed. The world really becomes a small place (D.C., L.A., New York, Berlin) and while there are still some minor glitches to it, you quickly emerge in a conversation that feels quite real. For dinner, we had Jackie Patillo, the acting CIO of DoT who was also willing to share her knowledge with the group.

The final day we spent time at IBM's Institute for eGovernment with an introductory part by Sherry Amos from SAP on the economic stimulus package and transparency. A vivid discussion started and I am curious to see how some ideas will be transferred to Germany/Europe. Many were skeptical about the use of Web 2.0 tools in the coming national election in Germany. Unlike the Obama campaign, Angela Merkel and Frank Walter Steinmeier, the candidates running for chancellor, lack a comparable story and mission. Moreover, a survey among participants conducted on the first day, showed that most perceived the level of transparency in government in Germany as rather poor. Other topics included: cloud computing (Among others, people wondered about: how does this connect the security needs of government?), government 2020 and "smart cities" (everything connected).

Several people twittered about the event: Ines Mergel (Ines also recently posted some Twitter recommendations), Anke Domscheit, Thomas Langkabel and Philipp Mueller.

We also managed to convince/bring Harald Lemke, the former CIO of the German State of Hesse, to the Twitter community.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 5:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) is using several different social media channels to inform about the swine flu besides the traditional (Web 1.0) channels, such as frequent press briefings, general information in audio and video, etc.:

1. Updates from the H1N1 page haven an RSS feed.


2. Frequent updates are spread using Twitter.


3. Video updates are posted using podcasts.


4. Image sharing on the CDCs Flickr site.


5. Buttons for your website.


6. Information sharing on MySpace's e-health page and daily strength group.


7. Updates can be shared using several different services (Google Reader, Bookmarks, Delicious, Facebook, Digg, etc.).


8. e-Cards to send by email to family members and friends to remind people to wash their hands.


9. Agencies can embed a flu widget on their page.

On the funny side: Do you have swine flu?

Posted by Ines Mergel at 7:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Just a short post. Stumbled on an interesting article in Social Computing mag.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 7:21 AM | Permalink

If you are looking for a colorful example of "social capital" check out article in sports section of today's New York Times, examining the flow of "intelligence" among NFL teams. It is an interesting study in the ethics of sharing insider information.

Excerpts below:

Spreading the Word Is No Secret in the N.F.L.

"Every team that you play against, your friends who play for other teams are like: 'Hey, tell me about this. Tell me about that. This defense, how does it run its scheme? Do they tip it?' " Washington Redskins running back Shaun Alexander said. "That's what happens. It's like advance scouting. You do the best scouting through your friends."

...

One look at the playing field in the hours before kickoff -- when players and coaches from both teams mingle as they warm up -- reveals the close ties that form the underpinnings of the N.F.L. Players who went to high school or college together catch up, although some do that the night before the game, when they may go out to dinner together. Coaches who may have been colleagues on the same staff early in their careers trade war stories. Even scouts, seeking confirmation of their player evaluations, check in with their peers as preparations for the draft begin.

"I probably knew coaches and scouts on every one of the 32 teams," said Steve Mariucci, the former San Francisco and Detroit coach who is now an analyst for the NFL Network. "You can't keep your head in the sand and assume your team knows everything there is to know. Communicating with your friends is not only accepted, it's necessary. Asking a question -- what did you think about so-and-so, what about their plan against you? -- those conversations can occur. No harm, no foul. It's commonplace."

But what makes the sharing of information all but inevitable is how often players and coaches switch teams. Coaches frequently call former colleagues during the season, and if their old friend just happened to have faced a future foe, so much the better. And if a friend coaches a team that is about to play a division rival, he will pour out the details.

...

One broadcaster said he was told that before the Baltimore Ravens played the Cincinnati Bengals in their season opener, the Ravens asked offensive lineman Willie Anderson -- who signed with Baltimore days after the Bengals cut him at the end of the preseason after 12 seasons -- why the Bengals had so much success blocking the Ravens' blitz. Anderson gave the Ravens' defense the Bengals' offensive line calls. The Bengals had not changed them. The Ravens were so effective that Bengals receiver Chad Ocho Cinco actually praised the blitz-oriented defense after the game.

"Is Baltimore the bad guy?" the broadcaster said rhetorically. "Is Willie Anderson the bad guy?"

Posted by David Lazer at 9:01 PM | Permalink

Ines Mergel, David Lazer and I have a paper out in the International Journal of Learning and Change on voluntary engagement in knowledge sharing. Based on data from our study of forensic scientists in government crime labs, we investigated why individuals make the time and effort to answer questions directed at them. In a multi-level framework we identify several influencing factors at the individual, relational, group, and informational level. Here's the abstract:

Knowledge is essential for the functioning of every social system, especially for professionals in knowledge-intensive organisations. Since individuals do not possess all the work-related knowledge that they require, they turn to others in search for that knowledge. While prior research has mainly focused on antecedents and consequences of knowledge sharing and understanding why people do not share knowledge, less is known why people provide knowledge, and what conditions trigger voluntary engagement in knowledge sharing. Our article addresses this gap by proposing a multi-level framework for voluntary engagement in knowledge sharing: individual, relational, group, and informational. We provide illustrations from a particular knowledge-intensive community, DNA forensic scientists who work at public laboratories.

A pdf version is available from the Inderscience website. Please contact me directly if you'd like a copy and have difficulty accessing the online pdf version.

Posted by Maria Binz-Scharf at 12:49 PM | Permalink

This hardly comes as a surprise: Corporations are increasingly tapping into the social capital of networks such as Facebook and MySpace, as reported in this NY Times article by Laurie J. Flynn today. From a theoretical standpoint, it makes a lot of sense: The ties in these online social networks reflect several layers of homophily (friendship, common interests, membership in various groups, partially self-selected affiliation, etc.) in addition to what usually applies to even the best organizational communities of practice. Several companies are now integrating business intelligence applications with the social Web and the Internet. Such "interrelated pools of information" bring value to business, says Flynn, mainly by fostering communication among employees, but also by better identifying job candidates and target customers. Let's just hope that Facebook will react to this development and allow the creation of different profiles for the various personae we represent on the Internet.

The article appeared in a special section of the New York Times today called "Tech Innovation". The section is filled to the brim with exciting and innovative ideas - one of these coming from the ever resourceful Bernardo Huberman of HP Labs. Together with his team he developed the prediction markets tool "Brain" (Behaviorally Robust Aggregation of Information in Networks), which can be employed to predict the demand of a new service, such as Internet television. I loved Huberman's quote a propos his brainchild: "We want to reduce the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of 12 or 13 people." Hopefully the right ones.

Posted by Maria Binz-Scharf at 9:57 AM | Permalink

When talking about information sharing and knowledge exchange inside firms, I am faced with the same question over and over again: "How do we know what we know and don't know?". Let me describe this to you with a small example.

HighTech Corp. is a medium sized technology firm in Europe. The communications department is responsible for ensuring a regular information flow and knowledge exchange between stakeholders inside and outside the firm. Internal stakeholders could be but are not limited to R&D engineers, sales staff or the management board of the firm. External stakeholders of the firm are distributors, clients or investors of the firm.

However, such information flow and knowledge exchange inside HighTech Corp. is often disturbed by physical, mental or psychological barriers of its personnel. Hence, the communication department faces serious problems when trying to find out what is going on inside the firm, what latest R&D trends are inside the firm/the industry, how clients react to HighTech Corps. novel product line etc.

As a consequence, HighTech Corp wants to embark on a project that puts a system/method/technology in place that can help the communication department to find out what HighTech Corp knows, what HighTech Corp does and who knows what inside HighTech Corp.

The overarching question(s) I have is/are: From everything we know about theories and concepts of information sharing in social networks, what are the theories with the most predictive power that can help us to better address such real-life issue?

On a more specific level, the questions could be formulated as follows:
- How do firms find out what they know and what they don't know?
- What methods should/should not be used?
- Can technology help?

- Can you get your personnel motivated to share their thoughts and ideas?
- If yes, how?
- If no, what do you do?

Posted by Thomas Langenberg at 10:55 AM | Permalink

Together with Timothy Huerta, Texas Tech University, and Jennifer van Stelle, Stanford University, I have written a paper on "How do networkers network?". We conducted a study of participants at the annual conference of INSNA (International Network of Social Network Analysts) to understand how young researchers are introduced into the community of senior researchers. The paper is work in progress at the moment and we would like to hear your comments, especially on our methodology.

You can find the paper in our working paper series (Working Paper # PNG07-005) and an abstract here:

This study was conceived during the 2005 INSNA conference by attendees who were interested in the evolving patterns of relationships among social network academics and consultants, and in how junior researchers were being integrated into the existing community. The study was also intended as a session- and space-planning aid for the 2006 conference organizers. Specifically, this paper describes a study of networking among social network professionals who attended the 2005 INSNA (International Network for Social Network Analysis) “Sunbelt” Conference. The attendees were asked to respond to two rounds of surveys regarding their experiences. We obtained data on existing and new ties in the first round of the survey, and tracked the maintenance or decay of those ties in the second round (approximately nine months later). We employ homophily arguments as well as theories of status and career/life cycle to determine what factors led to the establishment of ties from interactions at the conference. We consider the content of the new ties in addition to the above-mentioned theories to understand why such ties decayed or were maintained in the post-conference period. As well as applying the results of this study to the understanding of social network dynamics, we hope our findings will further the integration of new members into the existing community and enhance the session-scheduling and space-utilization aspects of conference planning.

Posted by Ines Mergel at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

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 | Permalink

The success of youtube and other video sharing platforms seems to have inspired other technology enthusiasts. I just found out about a new video sharing site for "instructional videos". It is called TeacherTube and proposes that it is "a site to provide anytime, anywhere professional development with teachers teaching teachers. As well, it is a site where teachers can post videos designed for students to view in order to learn a concept or skill".

Posted by Thomas Langenberg at 7:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Thanks to those who participated in my quick survey on individual search strategies. Here's an attempt to distill your answers into a few sentences.

As expected, the main questions that arise on your jobs can be classified as knowledge-intensive, and you most likely cannot find one correct answer to them. Some examples: Trying to establish what "the best" system, or practice, is (I suspect that we all have subjective criteria in deciding what's best), what do we know about xyz (rather open-ended, I'd say), finding out about a certain procedure, event, etc.

As for your search heuristics, Google comes in first place, and second, and third, and...Several plug-ins and other tricks render those Google searches more sophisticated (thanks for the pointers, Allan and David!), and most of you tend to find what you're looking for by using search engines. Which means, most of you do not actually need the interaction with other individuals to answer most of your questions. Gosh, I'm trying to remember what life (and work) was like before Google! Obviously, I have a biased (and non-representative) sample of individuals here, but still, what an interesting result.

My final question was whether your search behavior varies according to the questions you have, and the consensus was, yes, it does, but turning to "offline methods" or other people really came off as a last resort. Again, probably - at least in part - due to the still rather geeky nature of the blogosphere, but while I'm typing this I'm thinking of something else: Since I asked people to assess their search behavior, they could have made the implicit assumption that search is mainly done using search engines, therefore a priori excluding the dialogue with other individuals as a possibility to search for answers. Was that the case? Or are our search engines getting so good that they can replace human interaction? I'd be curious to find out. Maybe I should google it.

Posted by Maria Binz-Scharf at 3:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

One of the exercises in my Building Organizational Social Capital Class to illustrate the benefits and challenges of accessing the “knowledge in the network” was to have students post where they have vacation relevant knowledge on a Google maps mash up (at www.socialight.com). The way socialight works is that you can put “stickies” up on a global map in particular destinations—e.g., if you know about London, you put a sticky on London with some comments. Everyone who belongs to your channel can see the stickies in the map and can thus see what is known, and since each sticky belongs to an individual, you can see who knows what. Finally, since this is embedded within a social network type of site, you can see who knows whom. The idea was to see whether individuals in the class who were going on vacation (this is spring break at Harvard) had classmates with expertise on their destination. The nice thing, from a pedagogical point of view, is that geographic knowledge (unlike many other domains) can easily (and literally) be visually mapped in a way that everyone understands.

A few interesting lessons:

(1) There’s a lot of knowledge in the network—in my class of about 30 for every single destination that people had, there were quite a few people in the classroom who had substantial knowledge about that destination, even for fairly esoteric destinations, like Jordan.

(2) This knowledge is fairly invisible—most students did not know about the locations that other students had expertise in.

(3) Face to face still beats the Internet—just asking people where they were going and who knew about those locations proved vastly more effective at linking individuals than having people look at the map. Some of this has to do with the still developing socialight interface—e.g., the fact that only 10 stickies can be seen at a time proved to be a problematic constraint when you have well over 100 stickies on the map. Further, there is no way to search geographically for stickies. Of course, face to face is often not possible, which presumably is the power of Web 2.0.

(4) The value of the stickies was not so much in conveying knowledge (even though people put some interesting information on the stickies) as conveying who had knowledge.

(5) Boundaries can be important to facilitate sharing of knowledge. Unfortunately, a number of students received rather offensive spam from the site. This reflected the fact that we could not block entry to the channel we created, which meant that we had some interlopers. If we had long term aspirations for the mashup, this might well have scuttled any such plans.

(6) (not so much a lesson, but an idea) It would be neat to be able to highlight particular geographic areas and find out who in your network knows about those areas (this relates directly to research that Nosh Contractor has done on network and knowledge).

I will let you know in some future comment on this posting whether any students came away with knowledge that proved useful in their vacations…

Posted by David Lazer at 8:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Many of us spend a considerable amount of time every day on searching for various kinds of information required to do our job. I find it quite fascinating to observe how individuals go about this task in different ways. In some professions (or organizations?) there seems to be a set of unwritten norms guiding search behavior. Then, of course, how we search depends on our personal traits and preferences. If you generally are not the person who picks up the phone and calls somebody as soon as a question arises, you will probably use alternative ways to retrieve the answer you are looking for - such as sending a request to a listserv, or googling a term. Furthermore, we often use a combination of sources and media for a single query, sometimes without even realizing this "sequencing behavior". Finally, our search patterns most likely vary according to the type of knowledge we are looking for, as well as other parameters. These are some of the trends that emerge from an NSF-sponsored research project I'm conducting with David Lazer and Ines Mergel, and more about this will be posted here soon. But let me now turn to you, my fellow bloggers (and whoever else feels like answering, of course!), and ask you to respond to this quick survey about your own search behavior:

1. What are the three types of questions that come up most frequently on your job?
2. How do you generally start off your search for information on these questions (in terms of source and medium)?
3. Does your search behavior vary according to the type of questions you have? How and why?

You might find that you engage in much more complex search behaviors than you realize. Or not. Be humorous about your answer, if you wish. Thanks for playing along!

Posted by Maria Binz-Scharf at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

IBM has announced to launch its Lotus Connections software in the first half of 2007 and Cisco buys the technology assets of tribe.net. It seems as if social networking software has become an important business line within large software vendors.

From a researcher's perspective it makes sense for firms to connect their employees through social networking software. Finding information, locating experts and spotting project relevant knowledge effectively are promises social software seems to able to hold. If not, why would people be interested in paying annual membership fees on platforms such as xing.com or linkedin.com.

At the same time, software vendors haven't got much to offer than whitepapers, prototypes, or other studies. A persistent question software vendors might be struggling with thus is: What is the USP of online social networking software why is it worth a client's effort to go through a massive data migration effort from several expert or knowledge management databases to a consistent social networking platform?

Here are some arguments/talking points that might help:
- Validation through Existing Models: The success of Xing.com and LinkedIn.com as two prominent examples of popular professional social networking platforms shows that managers and practitioners are willing to spend time and money in locating contacts, knowledge, and information within social networks
- Tie Characteristics and Performance: Studies in the management literature have shown that the characteristics of ties among managers and employees can have strong effects on the firm's or a managers performance (Hansen 1999, Moran 2005, Obstfeld 2005, references see below)
- Privacy Concerns: People are willing to publish their profiles online (as it can be observed on prominent Web 2.0//online social networking sites and as described by Ines Mergel in her prior blog). Hence, people are used to publishing their profiles online, have experience with it and might ranke the expected benefits higher than potential data privacy concerns.

Hence, why should making ties among people within firms visible NOT help these people to become more effective or productive over time?

Continue reading "Enterprise Social Networking Software" »

Posted by Thomas Langenberg at 8:09 AM | Permalink

The strategy+business magazine recently launched a very interesting article on the "The Craft of Connection" within firms. The authors Tim Laseter and Rob Cross argue that the management of internal social networks is an important task which managers need to address as well when it comes to increasing firm performance.

Along these lines, in a recent theoretical study, Ines Mergel, Christopher Tucci, and me found that centrality of managers as well as the overall density of such firm internal social networks are important variables which explain when and why some firms are more capable of exploiting their knowledge than others. A working copy of the paper is available upon request from the author of this blog entry.

Posted by Thomas Langenberg at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Some days ago I attended a talk on human information processing by Thomas Mussweiler from the University of Cologne who spoke at the Columbia Business School. Mussweiler and colleagues conducted an impressive number of experiments on the mechanisms and influences of individual information processing. A simple example would be to ask you to determine your best athletic performance. You have two basic options: 1) You think of every single athletic moment in your life, i.e. you engage in absolute information processing, or 2) you compare what you recollect as some of your best performances to a given standard, e.g. a famous athlete’s performance (or a famous couch potato’s performance). Not surprisingly it turns out that comparison allows to process information in a more efficient manner.

Mussweiler went on to talk about various factors that influence the comparisons we make, most importantly the standards we employ for comparing information. His experiments used a technique called “priming” to activate certain standards – for example, subjects were asked to judge a trait in a person. The result shows that priming a trait concept (such as aggressiveness) will induce the subject to judge the target person according to that trait. In other words, once activated, standards are spontaneously compared to the target person.

While I was listening to the talk, I kept asking myself how the way we process information relates to how we search for it. Some possible bridges might be that the search itself is the result of some form of information comparison (my search is triggered by a comparison of the information I have to a “standard”, which is the knowledge I believe I need to possess), and/or that we subconsciously use standards to determine the source to turn to when searching for information. I don’t know if there’s literature out there that links cognitive psychology to advice networks, but it's definitely something useful to look into.

Posted by Maria Binz-Scharf at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The internet made us more powerful as well as making us more transparent. We have access to information anytime, anyplace. We can find, motivate or join like minded people to create something or influence a third party. We also leave our trails on blogs, social networking platforms, newsgroups or buying online. Governments and citizens alike can benefit from this trend.

Hierarchical government structures are the dominant model for public service delivery and meeting public policies. Although desired outcomes are mostly realized, this set-up turns out to have various downsides. Results are a silo like, inward-looking culture, slow decision making, change awareness or knowledge diffusion. While the latter also led to an institutionalized disconnect from citizens it can cause system failures when information and decision making transcends organizational and jurisdictional boundaries. Hurricane Katrina, the Avian Flu, various non-prevented terrorist attacks are such representative cases.

In addition, public administration has become continuously more complex. Economic, social, political and technological developments in the past decades have lead to a growth of the administrative apparatus, its size, power and obligations. Market-based reforms have optimized agency operations and privatized public services through contracting-out (i.e. Public Private Partnerships) or completely conferring them to the private sector. Hence, public managers and policy makers have to work within a sphere of multiple stakeholders and understand interdependent relationships for service provision, regulation and policy making. Knowing whom to hold accountable and a general understanding of this complex system is important for legislators as well as for citizen.

What can governments do?

1. Access
2. Dialogue
3. Transparency
4. Internal change

Governments need to provide access to its services and information by the latest channels (i.e. counter, call center, web portal). Additionally, pervasive municipal WLANs are part of the idea. However, access also means share as much data as possible that was kept within the organization in the past. It is important however to structure and phrase internal information when giving citizens access as they might not be accustomed to the terms, language or procedures. In general, constituents can come up with creative ways of adding value to that data by analyzing or linking it with other information. Google Maps mash-ups like Chicago crime watch are a good example. At the same time it is important that citizens can share their information with their government and fellow constituents.

Dialogues help governments to understand the emotional, social, cultural and government contexts that shape citizens experiences. In an iterative dialogue of equals people can learn from each other. Governments are doing this through focus groups, neighbourhood councils and the like. A centralized call center and number like 311 make it easier for citizens to start that dialogue. In the future, governments could also provide platforms where citizens and governments can form a network on government related topics. Many times though governments cooperated symbolically (Etzioni 1958: 261) usually causing citizens realizing the lack of impact returning to passivity.

By sharing internal knowledge or allowing citizens to track their public services governments create a lot of transparency. In fact they governments loose a level of control while at the same time adding value by decreasing their burden through information requests, using citizen’s input to improve internal efficiency, eliminating gate-keepers or changing daily management. Let’s take the impact of New York’s 311 implementation for example. If any engineer, architect or builder wanted to meet with a DOB building inspector, which was necessary to begin a project, they would have to use the services of an expediter, a person whose job it was to interact with City employees and to facilitate the permitting and inspection process. Each of these expediters had a relationship with an employee in the DOB. As such they were gate-keepers. Typically, expediters would book numerous appointments each day in case they were hired; they would then cancel appointments at the last minute if they did not need them. A building inspector would therefore have his calendar full for several weeks in the future, meaning that anyone not using an expediter would be forced to wait weeks for an appointment. Transparency combined with better access changed this. Now citizens are randomly assigned to an inspector so that nobody can maintain special relationships. Expediters are no longer useful or necessary. The inspectors are working at full capacity and have to meet certain performance criteria (i.e. response time, closing time).

Finally, internal change is necessary to provide an environment and infrastructure to make the above happen. Sustainable, top-level political leadership is one of the key success factors.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 2:50 PM | Permalink

Today's New York Times announces a new service from Tacit Software that will allow users to search for answers to their questions on the local computers of friends and colleagues - anonymously. The software (called Illumio) relies on a reverse auction model to determine who the "best expert" is in one's network. Sounds like a good idea to me, especially considering the problems people incur when searching for answers on listservs or through personal contacts. In a project I'm working on with David Lazer and Ines Mergel, we look at how people search for the knowledge they need to get their job done. Not surprisingly, we find that they generally don't look in the best places, but turn to those sources they are most comfortable with. We're hypothesizing that their comfort zone depends on their personality (a shy person would rather not post a question to a listserv, risking public humiliation in case their question is considered common knowledge) and the degree of familiarity with their peers, among others. On the response side, one's closest friends or those posting answers to questions on listservs might not be the "best experts" on a topic. (David and I will be presenting some early results of this project at the Academy of Management meeting in Atlanta; see our paper.)

Below is the full article from the Times.

Continue reading "Looking for an answer? Get a little help from your friends' computers" »

Posted by Maria Binz-Scharf at 3:15 PM | Permalink

Last week, an article in the New York Times reported on the newest developments in a decade-long struggle to modernize the F.B.I. computer system (“Cost Concerns for F.B.I. Computer Overhaul", March 14, 2006). Citing a Justice Department report, it says that the overhaul will likely cost “another half-billion dollars to complete". The same amount has already been spent: After the report by the 9/11 commission revealed that the antiquated computer system might have played a part in the intelligence gaps before 9/11, the F.B.I. reacted by devoting $535 million to its Trilogy Program, a network “designed to provide all FBI offices with better organization, access and analysis of information" (F.B.I. press release). So far, the results have been less than satisfactory: Its core component, a case management system (known as Virtual Case File system), collapsed under technical difficulties and was abandoned by the F.B.I. after it had spent $170 million on it. And a few days ago, an audit by the GAO revealed that the F.B.I. and its contractors spent more than $17 million on “questionable payments" (Washington Post, March 18, 2006). Now, the F.B.I. plans to spend $425 million on a new case management system, partly with the same contractors, named Sentinel.

What puzzled me was a statement by the inspector general’s office of the Justice Department quoted in the Times saying that they were unsure whether the new system, “even if successful, would allow the bureau to share information adequately with other intelligence and law enforcement agencies". The lack of information sharing was one of the main issues pointed out by the 9/11 commission, and yet, after investing a billion dollars, information sharing is not built into the system. It seems to me that the project would benefit enormously from the insights organizational researchers have into information networks. For example, my research shows that large IT projects that start off with an exploration of informational needs are more successful in the “exploitation", or implementation phase. Rather than focusing solely on network technology, the F.B.I. should devote some resources to finding out who needs to talk to whom. Have researchers conduct interviews, run focus groups, maybe even do an ethnography to identify the information network, then build the computer network to support it.

Posted by Maria Binz-Scharf at 8:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

In today's class on Network Analyis for Managers and Analysts we discussed how embeddedness matters for conducting transactions with friends, colleagues, or business partners. Since we attempted to make it an application driven class, we discussed managerial implications of the embeddedness concept a lot. We concluded that both relational ties and one's structural position in a network of personal contacts matter. Please find below some of the after-thoughts.

Continue reading "Structural vs. Relational Embeddedness: A useful Concept for Effective Knowledge Sharing within Firms?" »

Posted by Thomas Langenberg at 10:18 PM | Permalink

My sense is that social network analysis has increasingly been used for consulting purposes. This raises a couple of concerns and an opportunity. The concerns are two-fold: first is that a body of complex and sometimes conflicting findings are inevitably hyped and simplified as they pass through the prism of the consulting world—I think sometimes beyond recognition. Second is that, as noted in my previous posts, a lot of these findings rest on fairly shaky causal legs—particularly when you consider the lack of studies on system-level network structure and system performance. That is, perhaps importing these ideas into practice is the organizational equivalent of hormone replacement therapy. We make prescriptions based on correlational evidence, and make recommendations that may have adverse effects.

That said, ultimately ideas only matter if they have some impact on how people think and act—that is, people outside of the insular world of academia. One hopes that SNA can offer insights into how organizations (and other collectives) function, and how to operate more effectively. This all points back to my earlier arguments about the need to strengthen the foundations of causal assertions in the field.

This, in turn, points back to what (consultant and other based) interventions can offer back to the field—better insight into cause and effect. For example, do particular types of “network strengthening�? actually improve outcomes at group and individual levels as predicted? Does making expertise and social networks transparent increase knowledge sharing? Do efforts to increase relationships across silo’s improve coordination and access to information? And are there any unanticipated negative consequences? Etc etc. Of course, all of this presupposes building in evaluative measures into the intervention, and then a rigorous evaluation of whether the intervention worked, and it may not be reasonable to expect those that recommend certain interventions to rigorously evaluate them. But one problem at a time….

Posted by David Lazer at 10:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Are more ties always a better thing from the systemic point of view? Are silo's necessarily disfunctional for organizations? A lot of popular rhetoric out there regarding silo's, and the need to move toward networked ("boundaryless") forms suggests that this is the case. However, it is also plausible that it is valuable to buffer the various parts of an organization from each other so as to maintain a healthy diversity of viewpoints, and that efforts to bridge the silo's can, in the long run, bring about an unhealthy organization-wide "groupthink." Below I link to a paper on the Social Science Research Network by Allan Friedman and myself that explores this idea.

Paper:
The Parable of the Hare and the Tortoise: Small Worlds, Diversity, and System Performance

Abstract:
Whether as team members brainstorming, or cultures experimenting with new technologies, problem solvers communicate and share ideas. This paper examines how the structure of these communication networks can affect system-level performance. We present an agent-based model of information sharing, where the less successful emulate the more successful. Results suggest that where agents are dealing with a complex problem, the more efficient the network at disseminating information, and the higher the velocity of information over that network, the better the short run and lower the long run performance of the system. The dynamic underlying this result is that an inefficient network is better at exploration than an efficient network, supporting a more thorough search for solutions in the long run. This suggests that the efficient network is the hare - the fast starter - and the poorly connected network is the tortoise - slow at the start of the race, but ultimately triumphant.

Posted by David Lazer at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)