I was speaking to a good friend of mine a few days ago, who was busy trying to juggle demands from a few people who wanted an organizational chart completed of their entire organization. We’re not talking about a small company — it’s a mid- to large-sized multinational company.
Taken to the next level, there are immense potential benefits for relationship/network mapping, as well as mapping people to some of the terms that you might create in a taxonomy or controlled vocabulary.
This reminded me of something I read in KM World a while back (I’d link to it, but it was in paper) about how social networks need to replace organizational hierarchies. So wouldn’t it be cool to create some kind of human ontology where people are not only related to each other, but also to services, departments and job functions (by the way, ontologies and taxonomies have been explained in some really interesting ways, in case you’re curious)?
My excitement at having thought of this was quickly quashed by my friend’s reaction. “We can’t even create an organizational chart, let alone map out all these other relationships. We can’t even keep up with who reports to whom,” she informed me.
So what’s the answer? Should networks really replace the organizational chart as the way to represent how the organization is structured? Or do you first need to create a hierarchical organizational chart and then build out non-hierarchical relationships from those?
It would seem to me that while networks replacing organizational charts sounds really great — in reality, it’s not very practical. There will always be a place for hierarchical relationships between things and people. Social network mapping is an extremely useful tool, but an organizational chart represents a particular set of relationships and a specific structure that a social network map does not.
What do you think? Can social network mapping and organizational charting (I just made up that term, it sounds a bit nautical) co-exist? Or does one necessarily have to destroy or replace the other?
Like this post? Subscribe now to the full RSS feed.
May 1st, 2007 at 7:40 pm
[...] Read more from the original source: Lucas McDonnell [...]
May 8th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
Nice theme - what is the name of the theme, or did you create it yourself?
May 9th, 2007 at 2:32 pm
I made some minor modifications to the theme, but it’s actually a theme called Gridlock.
December 3rd, 2007 at 5:14 pm
I happen to see your blog when I was writing a white paper on the subject of “The reality of organizational charts and roles”. In my opinion there are three separate organizations at any company- the formal organization that is defined by the “Org Chart(s)” which define managements’ view of control and the employees view of reporting, direct reports, and escalation. The roles assigned here are formal to the extent that they define the employee’s existence in the HR rolls, the Active Directory and the level of access provided into buildings and facilities. These roles also have responsibilities related to the project or its tasks, and the people here do not abdicate their formal corporate roles.
But then there is the “Real Organization” which is where project organizations belong, Joint Venture programs with internal and external stakeholders, small projects and workflow assignments, and the ad hoc work assignments that people frequently do as a result of meeting or getting ready for meetings. The roles assigned are very real and they define exactly how the projects are executed under the leadership of the Project Manager. Access to working documents, and the all the issues of security and compliance impact these roles just as much it does the formal organization. In our experience we have seen as many as 3 to 10 separate roles being assigned to an individual as they take up positions on different project or committees. We call this the real organization because in knowledge intensive companies all the real work products originate in such an organization before they make their way to the formal organization.
The third organization is the recently much-talked-about social networks, also refered to in the past as the informal organization. Informal social networks are very important partly because they are informal and because they tap into the natural affinity of people who work with others who share their interests; who are of help on matters that require disparate skills or specialized knowledge; or who enjoy their relationships and work very collaboratively and well with the others in their network. Social networks are very important in establishing the RACI charts or assignments in critical projects where the risks are high, and trust is an important commodity in the relationships. Network maps are the easiest way to depict these relationships becasue people can be members of multiple networks and while these networks cluster around a “topic” they can also cluster around individuals. People who are connectors can form the nodes in many such netowrk diagrams.
In order to have all these three relationships shown it is indeed essential to have an ontology representation. With an ontology engine, it is possible to express these relationships and it is possible to attribute them according to expertise, social connectivity, and the formal pecking order of the organization.
December 12th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
I think you’re right on with these three slices of the organization, Suresh, as well as the complex ontological relationship mapping that has to happen in order to show how complicated all of this really is.
I’ve been giving a great deal of thought to the alignment of these three organizational structures (both formal and informal, as you’ve said). While I could see some potential problems with trying to create a perfect alignment between these three entities, I could also see many benefits in playing to the strengths of the existing social networks within an organization.
Conversely, however, I could also see some benefits around ’shaking up’ all three of these complex systems. Allowing new nodes to be created in a social network through the interaction of previously unrelated individuals could have some possibly-unforseen (but also difficult to measure) consequences.