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11.04.08 Add Some Real Structure To Your Company With NetAge OrgScope  By
Bill Ives
Recently, I spoke with Jessica Lipnack and Jeff Stamps at NetAge. They have been in the collaboration business for over 25 years and through many waves of technology. I have served with Jessica on several panels and was intrigued by their new offering, OrgScope. We started with its context and origins. I cross-posted this from the App Gap as I am really interested in what they are doing. Jessica and Jeff were working with a large energy company in Europe that wanted to consolidate over 100 country companies into five global divisions, of which the European division was the largest. NetAge, which had been working with this company on improving collaboration for a number of years, proposed an idea to the newly-named EVP of the European region. What would happen if they mapped the new organizational structure as a network, then analyzed it? The EVP agreed, which led to the development of OrgScope. Jeff proposed drawing HR data from the firm's SAP system to create a picture of the actual reporting relationships within the organization. "All enterprises have organization charts," Jeff said, "but few look at their entire structure as a whole. Often you only know one or two reporting relations removed from yourself and perhaps some of those at the top. But it's impossible to hold an entire organization chart in your head unless you're very small." And, as Jeff pointed out, very few companies, if any, analyze their hierarchies as networks.
The technical challenge was how to visualize this data for an organization of 5,000 people. After some investigation, NetAge decided to build OrgScope on StarTree, a hyperbolic viewer designed for visualizing large data networks. Originally developed at Xeroc PARC (then spun off to Inxight, which was bought by Business Objects, which was bought by SAP), StarTree maps hierarchies. Jeff's innovation was to apply the mapping technology to organizations, then add features unique to organization and work life. As the NetAge site says, "Hyperbolic graph layout uses a context + focus technique to represent and manipulate large tree hierarchies on limited screen size." Click to a dynamic OrgScope map to see this work in a 4000-position model organization. Through this kind of mapping, organizations can "see" things they otherwise couldn't. In the case of the energy company, they discovered that their organization was not in the expected pyramid shape but rather a diamond. Instead of most of the jobs being at the bottom, most were in the middle. Instead of there being a relatively even distribution of management span, it turned out most managers (about 80%) had only a few people reporting to them while about 20% had a relatively huge number reporting to them, in one case, 38 people. And, to the surprise of senior executives, most of these high-reporting-span managers were five or six levels down in the organization, out of sight for the people at the top. OrgScope provides models of organizations that everyone can share, contributing to real transparency. NetAge has developed similar maps for other organizations, which you can see on their web site. Included there are maps of the Boston-area healthcare "network," a complex web of connections among fierce competitors, and, most recently, maps of the network evolving out of the Office of Financial Stability, the US Treasury organization charged with distributing the $700B economic package (see below). Continue reading this article. About the Author: Dr. Bill Ives is an independent consultant and writer who has worked with Fortune 100 companies in business uses of emerging technologies for over 20 years. For several years he led the Knowledge Management Practice for a large consulting firm.. Now he primarily helps companies with their business blogs. He is also the VP of Social Media and blogger for TVissimo, a new TV schedule search engine. Prior to consulting, Dr. Ives was a Research Associate at Harvard University exploring the effects of media on cognition. He obtained his Ph. D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Toronto. Bill can be reached at his blog: Portals and KM. He also writes for the FastForward blog and the AppGap blog. |
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