Knowledge Matters™

Paul Hobcraft of HOCA International kindly sent me this interesting article called “Mapping the Crowd ”. The essence of the article is Boston Consulting Group’s efforts to map intellectual property. Boston Consulting Group is mapping links between people and corporations issuing patents, or conducting research on common problems. The reason for doing this is to allow managers to speed up research by resourcing promising areas and weaving the scientific network. This goal is similar to the underlying intent of my research , and my business network analysis™ method.

Seemingly Boston Consulting Group’s tool presents a map consisting of circles and lines, with the larger circles being areas of greater interest. I thought I would share with you an early diagram from my own research to show you that all they are doing is a form of network analysis.

This diagram maps contributions to an organisation’s business objectives. I have removed all the labels, arrowheads and link attributes to protect the innocent and preserve organisational anonymity. The business objectives are the yellow squares. Each circle represents an individual and is coloured by business unit, and sized by their contribution. The smallest circles are people who contribute to one objective and the largest circles in the centre of the map are those individuals who contribute to all the business objectives. Clearly the clusters of large circles in the centre of the map represent a core group of people, who are central to the productivity of the business.

Now if we examine the communication and collaboration exchange between individuals we get a very different picture. Again I have removed all the labels, arrowheads and link attributes to protect the innocent and preserve organisational anonymity. Each circle represents an individual and is coloured by business unit using the same colour-code as in the diagram above. The positions are sized by the number of incoming and outgoing links.

If we compare the two diagrams we can quickly see the contribution to business objectives are insular and stove-piped – there are many opportunities to weave the network and increase knowledge productivity. I also think considerable organisational efficiencies could be achieved!

So many thanks to Paul for sending me the article and prompting this blog. I hope I have shown the power of network maps, and that organisational networks matter.

Regards, Graham