The infrastructure for access to information still lags significantly behind the infrastructure within which information enters and leaves a company's network. The answer is metrics. A strong link between quantitative metrics and organizational network analysis is crucial as corporations become more complex, tasks more ambiguous, and employees more multi-faceted.
Today’s companies, especially large multinational firms, are clustered into business units and functions for efficiency purposes but a lot of information is lost as these units tend to focus mostly on resources that are within their units and not necessarily on underused resources in other units and function groups. Also, companies need a sure way to let go of key staff without letting go of key communication points within the company.
With quantitative methods and GUI displays of company teams and networks, managers of any unit can find connection points among groups and locate experts within such groups as well as identify over-challenged and under-challenged employees. Departmental budget constraints should not hinder business units and functions from interacting with other units within the same organization. Also with some metrics, cut-points within an organization can be found to rotate teams and bring in new ideas without relying on outside help i.e. interns, co-ops, new hires to fill in the gap especially since they are unfamiliar with the organization. In addition, teams can better plan for employees that will be going on vacation and for how long. In other words, the company-wide system will have to be real-time in terms of updating the metrics and controlled mostly by the managers of teams and units.
Primary component: an intranet site that contains all of the information that a program like Outlook would have but would be more sophisticated with metrics and GUI functionalities.
My company-wide system would give managers more access to information and teams more access to resources. Instead of wasting resources, i.e. time, to obtain more resources, managers will have access to real-time information and be able to act faster on the information that their sub-network receives and have better control of how to efficiently translate that information and transmit it across the meta-network. More importantly, the system would increase accountability and reduce stress by appropriately allocating resources and promote better planning. For example, using metrics, a team manager can locate his or her stars and see who is able to take on more work without having to pressure any one of them to take on more work.
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