Slashdot Mirror
Mapping Internal Communications
Patrick_Keogh writes "This article in The Economist discusses some research work from the Helsinki Institute of Physics which confirms what Scott Adams knew, and a lot of us suspected, that nobody talks to their boss. The research uses some novel mapping and visualisation techniques to map the communication interactions within a large engineering organisation." It's an interesting idea, but I would guess that it can't capture verbal communications very well, and that seems like a major flaw.
I assert that analysis of a dataset that results from the tracking of communication by e-mail (exclusively) will preferentially give you the "islands" of small engineering groups in the map of communication flow.
When an engineer has a question for someone in his group, the question is usually a short one with a short answer. Furthermore, both engineers will have the necessary context for the question and the answer already, and therefore will not require lots of conversation to establish the context. If the engineers are not in the same room at the time that the question arises, this is the ideal scenario for a quick e-mail exchange (e.g., Q:"Is the default level for GOBHP high or low?" A: "low")
However, if you have a question for someone outside of your group, you probably need to spend a little (or a lot) more time and effort establishing context. Also, you might need to do a little more personal introduction (e.g., "Sorry to bother you, but I work in the XYZ engineering group and we're using your ABC tool to do..."). This is the kind of situation in which people tend to get up from their chairs, walk across the building, and sit down for a ten-minute chat with a fellow employee.
Even beyond missing verbal communication like this, tracking e-mail misses the importance of technical documentation. The study did mention that it tracked what files people downloaded, but I doubt that this really captured the flow of technical documentation, since much information is _still_ exchanged in paper form (gak!).
I am a technical writer for a medium-sized chip manufacturer. I am subscribed to virtually every company-internal technical mailing list. I spend weeks or months in face-to-face (and face-to-whiteboard) conversations with engineers in one group so that I can put as much information as possible into a document that is then made available to the entire company. If I do my job right, then I am acting as a narrow but very-high-singl-to-noise-ratio bridge between the islands of engineering groups. I don't see the Finnish study as capturing this quality of information exchange.
Finally, meetings --- both between boss and subordinate and between larger numbers of engineering peers --- can be opportunities for a huge flow of information between these islands. (Yes, meetings can also be black holes from which no useful work can emerge, but that only seems to be the case around here when one of the non-engineering executives is involved).
In short, I think the Finnish study misrepresents the real situation. At least in my company, we have a pretty open flow of communication between (not just within) engineering groups.