Thursday, August 03, 2006

Visualizing organizational change

Social network analysis is often discussed as a way to see "how an organization really works." Less often do people acknowledge that "how an organization is changing" is often even more important than "how it is working." SNA researchers are hard at work developing ways of measuring change (typically under the name of "longitudinal studies"). Unfortunately, in a field that already suffers from interesting but hard-to-use technology, longitudinal methods of SNA are even more difficult to grasp and apply than their static snapshot counterparts (by a wide margin).

All that makes it even more impressive that the Accenture Institute for High Performance Business, led by Bob Thomas, has produced a relatively accessible dramatization of how real-time dynamic SNA can be a powerful business tool in the not-too-distant future.

I had the privilege of creating this seven-minute Flash video for Bob, in collaboration with Sarah Maloney of Accenture, Paul Trevithick and Mary Ruddy of Parity Communications and Barry O'Brien of North Shore Communications. You can see our handiwork here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License and is copyrighted (c) 2006 by Connective Associates except where otherwise noted.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Bruce - this looks very impressive. But how much of it is real and how much is smoke-and-mirrors?

And how do Accenture intend t gather the data for real-time SNA?