Powered by the Social Network Engineering and environmental consulting firm MWH Global reorganized

its information technology (IT) operations into a single global division and located its main service center
in New Zealand. Ken Loughridge was transferred from England to manage the new service center, but he
didn’t know who the key players were on his New Zealand team. “By and large, the staff I’d adopted
were strangers,” he says. Fortunately, Loughridge was able to consult a report displaying the informal
social network of relationships among his staff. MWH Global had surveyed its IT employees a few
months earlier about whom they communicated with most often for information. The data produced a
weblike diagram of nodes (people) connected by a maze of lines (relationships). From this picture,
Loughridge could identify the “go-to” people in the work unit. “It’s as if you took the top off an ant hill
and could see where there’s a hive of activity,” he says of the map. “It really helped me understand who
the players were.” For the past half century, sociologists have mapped informal power relationships in
organizations. Now, social network analysis is becoming a powerful management tool as practitioners
discover that visual displays of relationships and information flows can help them to tap into employees
with expertise and influence. “You look at an org chart within a company and you see the distribution of
power that should be,” says Eran Barak, global head of marketing strategies at Thomson Reuters. “You
look at the dynamics in the social networks [to] see the distribution of power that is. It reflects where
information is flowing—who is really driving things.” Karl Arunski, director of Raytheon’s engineering
center in Colorado, can appreciate these words. The defense and technology company’s organizational
chart didn’t show how mission management specialists influenced people across departmental
boundaries. So Arunski asked two executives to name up to 10 experts who didn’t fit squarely in a
particular department, and then he conducted social network analysis to see how these people
collaborated with engineers throughout the organization. The resulting maps (one of which is shown
here), showed Arunski the influence and knowledge flow of various experts. It also highlighted problems
where a cluster of employees is almost completely disconnected from the rest of the engineering group
(such as the top left side of this diagram). One team’s isolation was worrisome because its members
were experts in systems architecture, an important growth area for Raytheon. To increase the team’s
network power, Arunski encouraged the team leader to hold meetings at which engineers could share
information about systems architecture. The number of people attending eventually grew to 75,
reducing the team’s isolation from others. “Social Network Analysis helped Rocky Mountain Engineering
understand how organizations develop architectures, and it enabled us to know how engineers become
architects,” says Arunski.