Knowledge Matters

Understanding knowledge relationships

business network analysis™

January 2010 Network Analysis Seminar

network diagram of teamsOnce again I’m running a Network Analysis seminar at the University of Canberra on Friday the 29th of January 2010. The seminar is aimed at new researchers, but is useful for anyone wanting to know more about network analysis. The seminar occurs in the morning and is organised into three sessions.

Session one:

  • provides a brief history of network analysis;
  • positions network analysis in the research traditions;
  • explains why network analysis is useful, and why it is gaining traction now; and
  • provides some examples across disciplines where network analysis is being used.

I'm often asked what tools I use to collect, record and visualise data. I almost always collect data using a semi-structured interview technique. I find the results are richer and allow me to explore areas that a web-enabled survey won't allow. Similarly, I almost always record the answers directly into Microsoft Excel, although this isn't always practical. Quite often I build a database in Microsoft Access and manipulate data as required. My analysis and visualisation tools of choice are UCINET , NetDraw , and NetMiner 3 . Each has its strengths and weaknesses, which I might deal with in another post. Increasingly, however I find myself using NodeXL ; at least to do the hack work.

NodeXL is a free Microsoft Excel 2007 add-in. I blogged about NodeXL some months ago when it was called ".NetMap", however I understand for legal reasons the name was changed to NodeXL. NodeXL is now at build 88 and just gets better and better. It now features zoom and scale, more metrics, better ribbon layout, more filtering options, additional layouts, and better control over the graph pane contents.

I've been reading a good deal about program and portfolio management of late. I even did the United Kingdom Office of Government Commerce's Portfolio, Programme and Project Offices course a week or two ago. This course builds on the PRINCE2 methodology for projects, but I digress. One of the problems I find with portfolio and program management is the lack of simple high level tools to measure the health of the organisation. RAAAKERS™ Profiling, which I'm developing as part of my PhD, may provide a tool.

RAAAKERS™ stands for Responsibility, Authority, Accountability, Awareness, Knowledge, Experience, Resources and Systems and is as a way of representing the main attributes associated with management of a large or complex enterprise. A bottom up approach is applied by collecting data from end users and then aggregating it into a visualisation. I've used it a few times and my colleague Doctor Mark Burnett has also used it with success - see this peer-reviewed article for a description of its use in an organisation. Anyway today I thought I would look at data collected in my PhD and see if the resultant visualisations might be of use. Consider the graph below.

Copyright © 2004 -2010 Knowledge Matters™ - all rights reserved

The Webpages of Durant-Law Consulting Pty Limited
and Occasional Blog of Graham Durant-Law

E-mail: graham@durantlaw.info

Syndicate content

Clicky