I recently spoke with Jessica Lipnack and Jeff Stamps at NetAge.  They have been in the collaboration business for over 25 years and through many waves of technology.  I have served with Jessica on several panels and was intrigued by their new offering, OrgScope. We started with its context and origins.

Jessica and Jeff were working with a large energy company in Europe that wanted to consolidate over 100 country companies into five global divisions, of which the European division was the largest. NetAge, which had been working with this company on improving collaboration for a number of years, proposed an idea to the newly-named EVP of the European region. What would happen if they mapped the new organizational structure as a network, then analyzed it?  The EVP agreed, which led to the development of OrgScope. Jeff proposed drawing HR data from the firm’s SAP system to create a picture of the actual reporting relationships within the organization. “All enterprises have organization charts,” Jeff said, “but few look at their entire structure as a whole. Often you only know one or two reporting relations removed from yourself and perhaps some of those at the top. But it’s impossible to hold an entire organization chart in your head unless you’re very small.” And, as Jeff pointed out, very few companies, if any, analyze their hierarchies as networks.

The technical challenge was how to visualize this data for an organization of 5,000 people. After some investigation, NetAge decided to build OrgScope on StarTree, a hyperbolic viewer designed for visualizing large data networks. Originally developed at Xeroc PARC (then spun off to Inxight, which was bought by Business Objects, which was bought by SAP), StarTree maps hierarchies. Jeff’s innovation was to apply the mapping technology to organizations, then add features unique to organization and work life. As the NetAge site says, “Hyperbolic graph layout uses a context + focus technique to represent and manipulate large tree hierarchies on limited screen size.” Click to a dynamic OrgScope map to see this work in a 4000-position model organization.

Through this kind of mapping, organizations can “see” things they otherwise couldn’t. In the case of the energy company, they discovered that their organization was not in the expected pyramid shape but rather a diamond. Instead of most of the jobs being at the bottom, most were in the middle. Instead of there being a relatively even distribution of management span, it turned out most managers (about 80%) had only a few people reporting to them while about 20% had a relatively huge number reporting to them, in one case, 38 people. And, to the surprise of senior executives, most of these high-reporting-span managers were five or six levels down in the organization, out of sight for the people at the top.

OrgScope provides models of organizations that everyone can share, contributing to real transparency. NetAge has developed similar maps for other organizations, which you can see on their web site. Included there are maps of the Boston-area healthcare “network,” a complex web of connections among fierce competitors, and, most recently, maps of the network evolving out of the Office of Financial Stability, the US Treasury organization charged with distributing the $700B economic package (see below).

Jeff pointed out that they can draw data for constructing maps from many places, including HR systems like SAP, from LDAP data, and from traditional org charts. The LDAP data is potentially broader, Jeff says, as it includes contractors who have access to companies’ information systems. These people are often invisible in traditional HR systems but because IT has to grant them access and because such people always report to someone in the organization, their names and positions show up in the IT directory.  Moving beyond reporting relationships, OrgScope also maps team memberships (which LDAP similarly captures through permission structures), information flows, and workflows, which together give more complete pictures of the organizational network. Of course, Jeff points out, you can further enhance these maps with social networking information. But, he cautions, it’s always good to start with what everyone agrees on—the reporting hierarchy, which, for better or for worse, exists in every organization.

Once configured as desired, the OrgScope maps can published to the web as a Java applet and viewed in a browser, as the examples show. Here are some of the key OrgScope attributes, as covered on the NetAge site:

Visualize. See the whole network, provide context for each part. Seeing is understanding. Collaboration across boundaries requires access and transparency.

Navigate. Use the map for searching and finding specific people and information in larger context, creating new organizational and learning routes, and serendipity. URLs connect map to internal and external webs of disparate information.

Analyze.  Where data is relatively complete, the map can be analyzed as a network. Node metrics and distributions provide management tools and scientific measures for improvement and comparison with performance measures.

Here is a sample map applied to Boston area healthcare providers and a link to the dynamic OrgScope map.

But there is much more as OrgScope is just one component of the network and collaboration work that NetAge does. Its power comes in the broader context of understanding collaboration within the organization and facilitating action based on the transparency revealed. For example, NetAge is currently working with the US Army to increase virtual teams and collaboration in the Battle Command Knowledge System (BCKS), which I have written about before in describing the Army’s Warrior Knowledge Base (WKB).  This is another excellent collaboration effort but it generally addresses users at lower levels in the Army. (see - US Army’s Battle Command Knowledge System (BCKS) Moves to XML-based Platform).

NetAge is working on “The Teams of Leaders Handbook,” an effort to promote collaboration at higher levels. Working with the BCKS team, NetAge created the handbook to support the “Teams of Leaders” effort generally, directed at addressing the Army’s need to promote collaboration at higher levels. NetAge also has helped design the structure for the BCKS virtual team spaces, built on SharePoint.

As Jeff explains it, the virtual team room design is technology neutral, and rests on the method that he and Jessica have laid out in their books (most recently, Virtual Teams): people, purpose, links, and time. This alleviates what Jeff calls “the blank page problem,” where new teams want to collaborate and use shared online spaces but have no idea where to start. See the screenshot of the online team room that BCKS has constructed for the Teams of Leaders project in SharePoint using the NetAge methodology.

Finally, NetAge is applying its expertise in transparency through collaboration to the current economic crisis. Here is certainly an area where more transparency is needed. In a series of posts on Endless Knots, Jessica’s blog, they recommend to creating a public, visible map of the network of organizations and people that spend and receive funds, a “Google Earth” for the players and contracts, which they’ve done on their site using OrgScope to visualize these relationships. They also suggest the creation of a public searchable database on all emergency financial spending using the model of www.USAspending.gov, dubbed “Google for Government” (See this government site, which describes itself as “Where Americans Can See Where Their Money Goes.” Now, here is another helpful idea and a great application for OrgScope. I hope it gets traction. Here is a sample of how part of it might look and a link to the dynamic map.