Projects

How does it work?
Students will work as consultants at a partner company site during spring break (March 14-25, 2005). They will be collecting data for knowledge flow optimization and social network analysis of a team/department/project (usually 20-200 people) selected by the company. Application areas in the past have been project management, sales and marketing, research & development and mergers & acquisitions, but there are many other potential areas such as customer care representatives and call centers.

What does the company get?
Students and instructors will analyze the data and develop recommendations for increased knowledge worker productivity and innovation, doing an analysis such as this one and identifying potential periods of high productivity and information dissemination. The company gets:
(1) a benchmark of organizational effectiveness based on their analyzed communication flow in comparison with other organizations
(2) suggestions for interventions to improve knowledge worker productivity
(3) access to generalized and anonymized research results of all student projects.

Results belong to the company, but we hope to get permission to use anonymized results to develop best-practice benchmarks for our research project.

What do we need?
From the company we expect availability of key management and staff for one-hour interviews, participation in a one-time online survey for all members of the group (about 15 minutes per person), and access to communication data. There are different types of communication data that can be used in conjunction with our TeCFlow communication flow analysis software to keep the burden on collecting data on who is communicating with whom away from the end user:
- headers of e-mail archives
- phone archives
- instant messaging archives
- mailing list archives
There are two options to do this analysis. We can do a so-called "ego-analysis" analyzing communication archives of the group leader and/or coordinator, or we can do a group analysis, analyzing archives of teams such as its phone logs and mail-server archives. If those two options are not available, we can also collect communication data through a Web-based online survey.

If the students need to travel, we expect the partner company to cover travel expenses.

Optimizing the Knowledge Flow of Partner Organizations
Similarly to weather patterns predicting sunshine and thunderstorms, communication flow permits to predict positive and negative developments in groups of people. Analogously to a weather forecast, Knowledge Flow Optimization is highly valuable as an early warning system, showing high-pressure systems, impending blow-ups, and other relationships in groups hard to obtain by other means.

Business process reengineering forever changed the way how companies do business, introducing a process focus and streamlining structured business processes. Knowledge Flow Optimization does the same for unstructured, knowledge-intensive processes. By visualizing the flow of knowledge, making it transparent, and reengineering its flow, organizations and individuals become more creative, innovative and responsive to change. Knowledge Flow Optimization offers companies a chance to complement their business process maps and organizational charts with much more fluid maps of communication flows. By making the communication flow transparent, business processes can be made more efficient, allowing organizations to make better use of people by freeing them from being buried in conventional multilayer hierarchies and inefficient business processes. By establishing flexible ad hoc workflows based on communication flows, people get more efficient roles, also leading to increased motivation of the individual.