The Organizational Network Fieldbook E-Book

Robert L. Cross

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 576

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

The Organizational Network Fieldbook "This is the ultimate resource for practitioners who want to implement insights from organizational network analysis and thinking. Dozens of concrete examples, interventions, and practical advice from network experts show you what you can do to strengthen networks and boost performance. This book is essential for anyone in business, government, orconsulting who wants to get network thinking from analysis to action in organizations." --WAYNE BAKER, professor of management and organizations, Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan "What a great idea this book is! The Organizational Network Fieldbook will demand to be read by anyone undertaking any social network efforts in their organization. It is not only a unique book, but it is also very well thought-out, finely written, and exceptionally pragmatic. It's a great achievement for the authors and a great boon to all practitioners." --LARRY PRUSAK, researcher and consultant, and the founder and former director of the Institute for Knowledge Management In this practical companion to the best-selling Driving Results Through Social Networks, the authors draw on their network-building activities in organizations such as ConocoPhillips, 3M, and the United States Department of Defense in order to provide a compilation of highly practical approaches to help leaders shift their focus from formal organizational structures to a better understanding of flexible networks.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

THE CONTRIBUTORS

Introduction

PART ONE - BUILDING NETWORKS FOR COLLABORATION AND COMMUNITY

CHAPTER ONE - BUILDING A TECHNICAL COMMUNITY

VeriSign′s Goals for a Technical Community

Strategy and Approach

Enhancing and Expanding the Community

CHAPTER TWO - NETWORKS OF EXCELLENCE

Excellence Networks at ConocoPhillips

Network Formation

Network Roles and Responsibilities

Knowledge-Sharing Culture

Day-to-Day Network Operation

An Underlying Urgency

CHAPTER THREE - DRIVING BUSINESS RESULTS THROUGH NETWORKED COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE

Organizational Network Analysis and CoPs at Halliburton

Five Added-Value Propositions of Network Analysis

Endnote

CHAPTER FOUR - MAPPING AND ENGAGING INFLUENCE NETWORKS

An Influence Network Analysis at TechFirm

Step 1: Identify Opportunities

Step 2: Build Partnerships

Step 3: Facilitate Connections

Step 4: Sustain Relationships

PART TWO - BRIDGING ORGANIZATIONAL SILOS

CHAPTER FIVE - NETWORK ANALYSIS FOR ENGINEERING SMALL PRACTICE GROUPS

Small Practice Groups for a 3M Division

A Four-Step Process Toward Small Practice Groups

Results at 3M’s Really Big Division

CHAPTER SIX - BUILDING TRUSTED TIES IN A NEW ORGANIZATION

An Approach Informed by Organizational Network Analysis (ONA)

Conducting the ONA

Reviewing the Results with the Department

The Workshop

The Projects

Results in Progress

Endnotes

CHAPTER SEVEN - FORGING GLOBAL CONNECTIONS

The Challenge of IT Reorganization

Team Building

Virtual Leadership Training

Cross-Functional Team Design

Results of these Efforts

CHAPTER EIGHT - BUILDING HEALTHY TEAMS

Building Teams at Knox

The Six Exercises

Evaluation

References

Endnotes

PART THREE - DRIVING ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE THROUGH NETWORKS

CHAPTER NINE - CHANGING CULTURE THROUGH NETWORKS AND NARRATIVE

Identifying Change Agents

Driving Change with Business Narrative

Network Analysis and Business Narrative Change Program

Where to Start

CHAPTER TEN - MESSAGE MONITORING TO ACCELERATE CHANGE

Background to the Cleveland Clinic and to Resurrection Health Care

Where Message Monitoring May Be Useful

The Message Monitoring Process

Additional Lessons for Large Transformational Efforts

Outcomes at the Cleveland Clinic and Resurrection Health

CHAPTER ELEVEN - A WORKSHOP FOR ALIGNING NETWORKS WITH STRATEGY

Workshop Overview

Preparation

Part 1: Strategy Discussion

Part 2: Network Perspective and Action Planning

Next Steps

CHAPTER TWELVE - POSITIONING A NEW LEADER FOR SUCCESS THROUGH NETWORK FINE-TUNING

Four Challenging Objectives

Objective 1: Improve Overall Collaboration

Objective 2: Drive Revenue Growth Through Improved Connectivity

Objective 3: Drive Service Innovation and Cross-Selling

Objective 4: Improve Talent Management

Reaping the Rewards

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - IMPROVING DECISION MAKING THROUGH NETWORK RECONSTRUCTION

Diagnosing the Problem

Examining Organizational Networks

Quantifying the Costs of Inefficient Decision Making

Designing and Executing Interventions

Reaping Rewards

PART FOUR - CONNECTING PEOPLE FOR INNOVATION

CHAPTER FOURTEEN - THE INNOVATION LAB: BUILDING IDEA-SHARING NETWORKS

Innovation Lab Overview

Workshop I: Building Blocks of Innovation

Workshop II: External Connectivity

Workshop III: Internal Connectivity

Workshop IV: Converting Ideas to Products and Practices

Workshop V: Diffusion of the Innovation Process

The Exercises

References

CHAPTER FIFTEEN - BUILDING A COLLABORATIVE INNOVATION NETWORK

The Myelin Repair Foundation

Laying the Basis of a Collaborative Innovation Network

Extending the Network

How Has the MRF’s Model Performed?

Lessons for Other Organizations

Endnotes

CHAPTER SIXTEEN - CONNECTING THROUGH IMPROVISATION

Getting Started

The Plan of Exercises

Warming Up and Generating Group Energy

Moving Toward and Moving Away From

Building Synergy

Relationships Within Hierarchy

Endnote

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - HELPING LEADERS UNCOVER HIDDEN ASSETS

A Hidden Assets Program

Hidden Assets Activity

The Activity in Other Settings

References

PART FIVE - DEVELOPING TALENT THROUGH NETWORKS

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - EMBEDDING A NETWORK PERSPECTIVE INTO LEADERSHIP

Leadership Challenges and the Place of Networking

Practice 1. Authenticity as the Leader’s Lever for Building Effective Networks

Practice 2. Network Mapping and Stakeholder Analysis

Practice 3. Speed Networking

Endnotes

CHAPTER NINETEEN - IMPROVING LEADERSHIP EFFECTIVENESS THROUGH PERSONAL NETWORK ...

A Workshop on Networks

Session 2: Promoting Effectiveness Through Personal Networks

Endnotes

CHAPTER TWENTY - DEVELOPING LEADERS’ NETWORKS THROUGH A STAKEHOLDER MAPPING AND ...

Devising the Workshop

Overview of the Workshop

Workshop Preparation

The Session

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - THE MENTOR MARKETPLACE

The Basic Challenges

What Is a Mentor?

How Does the Mentor Marketplace Work?

Connections to Other Mentoring Initiatives

Results

Implementation Challenges

Value for Other Organizations

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - MANAGING EXTERNAL STAKEHOLDERS AND STEMMING KNOWLEDGE LOSS

The Challenges at a Pharmaceutical Company

The Network Analysis Project

Implementation

Epilogue

Key Insights

Endnote

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - SMART MENTORING TO INCREASE CONNECTIVITY

The Knowledge Lab Network

Launching the Mentoring Program

Results

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - NEWCOMERS’ BOOT CAMP

An Onboarding Challenge

Developing a Boot Camp

The Current Camp

Results

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - A NETWORK APPROACH TO ONBOARDING

Example 1: Onboarding a New Controller at a Biotech Company

Example 2: Understanding Senior Executive Dynamics at an Architecture Firm

Example 3: Rethinking Onboarding at IFC

Example 4: Uncovering Organizational Norms

References

Endnote

INDEX

Copyright © 2010 by Rob Cross, Jean Singer, Sally Colella, Robert J. Thomas, Yaarit Silverstone. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-470-54220-0 (pbk.)

1. Business networks. 2. Social networks. 3. Technological innovations—Management. I. Cross, Robert L.

HD69.S8O74 2010

658’.046—dc22

2010008642

PB Printing

To Jake, who inspires us to think, to do important work, and to act with honor.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

It is due to the extraordinary contributions of Amy Halliday, our professional writer and editor, that you now hold this book in your hands. With patience, good humor, and tact, Amy helped us to transform our widely varied experiences into the written word. Amy showed us time and again through her own example what it means to be a good writer. We thank her for endless hours of review and restructuring, for rescuing us countless times from our own writing gone awry, and for the gifts of her editorial insights that helped us to craft 25 chapters into a book.

THE CONTRIBUTORS

Rob Cross is a professor of management at the University of Virginia and research director of The Network Roundtable, a consortium of nearly 80 organizations sponsoring research on network applications to critical management issues. His research focuses on how relationships and informal networks in organizations can be analyzed and improved to promote competitive advantage, innovation, customer retention and profitability, leadership effectiveness, talent management, and quality of work life. In addition to top scholarly outlets, his work has been repeatedly published in Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, California Management Review, Academy of Management Executive, and Organizational Dynamics.

Jean Singer, Ph.D., is an organizational consultant specializing in the use of social network principles and techniques to improve performance. For more than two decades, she has helped companies build cross-functional collaboration, enhance work process efficiency, and foster innovation, particularly in the fields of science and technology.

Sally Colella is an organization and team development consultant who specializes in working with leaders and teams to strengthen their networks. Her clients include a broad range of public and private clients, and her work is highly integrated with business strategy. Prior to becoming a consultant, she was an HR leader with a Fortune 50 company.

Robert J. Thomas, Ph.D., is the executive director of Accenture’s Institute for High Performance, a global “think and act” tank with offices in Beijing, Boston, Delhi, and London. In addition, he teaches global leadership and organizational change at the Brandeis University International Business School. He coauthored Driving Results Through Social Networks with Rob Cross.

Yaarit Silverstone is the managing director responsible for organization effectiveness offerings and capabilities within Accenture’s Talent and Organization Performance practice. She has more than 24 years of experience in diagnosing complex organizational performance issues and designing, implementing, and sustaining large-scale journey management, human capital strategy, and talent management solutions as well as leadership development programs.

Lauren Ashwell is an organizational consultant and leadership coach. She works with leaders across industries to meet the challenges of expanding or changing roles, and she works with organizations to improve their capacity to realize the intended benefits of bringing on new talent. Her practice is built on 30 years of experience in media and entertainment as well as financial services.

Wendi Backler is a global topic advisor with The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), where she co-leads the firm’s Network Advantage topic. Wendi has worked with more than 50 clients to apply the network lens to a range of business strategy and organizational issues. She is also director of BCG’s Networks Insight Center and has more recently been spearheading BCG’s work in innovation networks, open innovation, and stakeholder ecosystem mapping.

Joe Blasnales is an information security specialist whose work has included cryptographic development, software integrity, network security, and computer forensics. He has been in the business for more than 25 years, working for both private companies and government agencies.

Ivan J. Blum is a global strategy, technology, and operations executive and management consultant with deep industry experience in high technology, complex engineered products manufacturing, consumer products, pharmaceuticals, health care, and government. Adept at building and motivating cross-functional teams, he has held senior positions at three international management-consulting firms and at IBM. He is currently an adjunct professor in graduate business at the University of Connecticut and Albertus Magnus College.

Grady Bryant, VP of Platform Product Development at VeriSign, oversees the development of VeriSign’s software for the systems, platforms, and frameworks that enable and protect the world’s networked interactions. This includes the Internet Domain Name System (DNS), security certificate validation (OCSP), and storage/processing of extremely large files and datasets. Grady played a key role in the development of the VeriSign Technical Community, which fosters information sharing and innovation for VeriSign’s technical staff across geographical and organizational boundaries.

Michel Buffet, Ph.D., is a managing partner at Fisher Rock Consulting, a firm advising and providing solutions to senior leaders on organizational change, human capital strategy, and individual and team assessment and development. For more than 15 years, he has worked with leading global Fortune 1000 organizations across a variety of industries, including consumer products, energy, financial services, life sciences, and retail.

Inga Carboni is an assistant professor of organizational behavior in the Mason School of Business at the College of William and Mary. Her research explores knowledge management and conflict dynamics from a social networks perspective. As a consultant, she works with individuals and organizations to develop leaders and build high-performing teams.

Michael Chavez is a regional managing director for Duke Corporate Education, overseeing client work for the Western U.S. and Asia-Pacific region. For more than 17 years, Michael has helped global companies, particularly in the biotech, pharmaceutical, and technology sectors, build a wide range of organizational capabilities, including strategic thinking, team collaboration, and innovation. Prior to Duke CE, Michael was a founding member of the executive team of a successful B2B software start-up, leading both the professional services and marketing teams. His broad professional experience also includes consumer marketing, strategy consulting, and organizational development and learning consulting for a Fortune 100 company.

Barry Dayton leads 3M’s Knowledge Management Program Office (KMPO), which is based out of Corporate Strategy and serves as a corporate center of expertise and internal consultancy for improving 3M’s business performance through the mindful application of KM tools and practices. KMPO currently has more than 20 engagements spanning all functions, several businesses, and more than 40 countries.

Steve Denning is the author of The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling (Jossey-Bass, 2005) and The Secret Language of Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2007). Formerly the program director of knowledge management at the World Bank, he is currently a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University, UK.

Christie Dowling, PE, PMP, is an environmental engineer with a passion for enhancing connections between people and groups to streamline work processes and increase reapplication of knowledge. She uses network analysis to expose key connections and identify sectors in need of support.

Kristi Droppers is the president of Collective Know-How, LLC, a consulting firm that collaborates with clients on meetings to create greater understanding, strategic planning, communication, and innovation. Prior to creating her own consulting firm, Kristi was executive vice president at Davis & Company, an award-winning internal communications firm. Kristi is an experienced facilitator and speaker at conferences, covering topics such as helping leaders and managers communicate, creating culture change, creating and sustaining a culture of innovation, and helping teams plan strategic communication programs.

Ana Dutra is the chief executive officer of Korn/Ferry International’s Leadership and Talent Consulting, based in Chicago. With more than two decades of experience in management consulting, her expertise lies in helping boards, CEOs, and senior management in global companies to identify and align around transformational and growth strategies, particularly in the areas of innovation, disruptive growth, culture transformation, and mergers and acquisitions across various industries.

Kate Ehrlich, Ph.D., is a senior researcher at IBM Research, where she uses social network analysis as a research and consulting tool to gain insights into patterns of collaboration in distributed teams. Kate has published academic papers on her research in CHI, CSCW, software engineering, and management science at premier conferences and in journals.

Angelique Finan is a program manager in VeriSign’s CTO organization, where she manages the VeriSign Technical Community program and the development of community building and networking capabilities across the company. Previously, she led knowledge-sharing initiatives in various Fortune 500 companies and the federal government, founded an e-commerce startup during the dot.com heydays, and obtained her technical background as a Java developer and Oracle

DBA.

Christiane Frischmuth is an executive coach, a team coach, a facilitator, a process consultant, and a trainer who specializes in building capacity to lead and learn effectively to create results for individuals, groups, and organizations. She has worked and lived in Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and North America. She integrates mind, body, heart, and soul into her practice and draws on creative processes from many areas to achieve lasting impact and change.

Maria Gallegos is a learning specialist at the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of the World Bank Group. She oversees training and learning development for nearly 200 staff in the Environment and Social Development department. Maria has designed and implemented the department’s onboarding program as well as corporate training programs on environment and social sustainability.

Peter Gray is an assistant professor at the McIntire School of Commerce, University of Virginia. He leads the Technology Enabled Networks group of The Network Roundtable, a consortium of leading organizations sponsoring research on network applications to critical management issues. His research and consulting focus is on the collaborative impact of social technologies, organizational networks, virtual teams, online communities, and knowledge management systems.

Mara Green is a project director at Duke Corporate Education. She engages in a wide range of activities, from conducting research to writing proposals to designing and creating content to managing client engagements. She has worked with a range of global companies to deliver high-impact and innovative educational experiences in both face-to-face and virtual formats.

Victor Gulas, Ph.D., is a leading practitioner of organizational network analysis in corporate environments. Recently retired, in his former role as chief people and knowledge officer at one of the world’s leading global environmental engineering /construction companies, he introduced, nurtured, and applied ONA in knowledge management, organizational efficiency and design, innovation, financial transactions, and numerous other applications.

Betsy Hudson, M.Ed., is an organization development consultant with the U.S. Department of Defense who seeks ways to use social network concepts to help people connect across hierarchical and technological boundaries. Her areas of focus include knowledge management, retention, and innovation.

Gregory A. Janicik, Ph.D., is a principal in Korn/Ferry International’s Leadership and Talent Consulting group, based in the firm’s New York office. He is also the global leader for board effectiveness. He has worked on talent management initiatives with clients across a wide range of industries, including financial services, media and entertainment, retail, and pharmaceuticals.

Brigitte Lippmann is a talent management leader in a Fortune 50 company focusing on optimizing human capital. Social and organizational network analysis are key tools that she applies from leader onboarding to talent development to organizational alignment. Brigitte was a strategic management consultant for 10 years before joining leading firms in the health care and investment-banking industries.

Carrie Newberry is a research and development manager for a global consulting firm, specializing in operational strategy. She has more than 12 years of experience in consulting and industry, helping clients with their organization design, diagnosing and developing organizational culture, and managing large-scale strategic initiatives.

Myra Norton is a leading thinker on the application of social networks within communities, speaking and writing on this subject in a variety of venues. As the CEO of Community Analytics, Norton is advancing the firm’s tagline, The Power of Human Networks—a succinct statement of the company’s vision of authentic customer engagement. This commitment is driving the company’s strategy among many Fortune 1000 companies as well as top colleges and universities.

Giulio Quaggiotto is a senior program officer at the World Bank. He has 12 years of professional experience in knowledge management and information dissemination in the private and nonprofit sector. His current interests include the applications of social media for the development sector. Giulio regularly blogs at psdblog.worldbank.org.

Dan Ranta is the director of knowledge sharing at ConocoPhillips, where he is accountable for the strategic implementation of knowledge sharing and networks for the 31,000-person integrated oil and gas company (a top 10 global company in total revenue terms). Prior to joining ConocoPhillips in 2006, he consulted in knowledge management. In total, Dan has worked in various knowledge management roles for more than 14 years.

Betsy Smith Redfern earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature and a master’s in curriculum design. She is a lifetime teacher of children, adolescents, and adults with more than 30 years of experience in the discovery, design, and implementation in the art and science of learning.

Katy Strei is a seasoned leadership and organizational development executive. For more than 20 years, she has partnered with line leaders in multiple industries to build strong leadership cultures that drive business performance. She is currently a vice president for leadership and organization development at MedImmune, the biologics division of AstraZeneca.

Guillermo Velasquez is the technology manager for Halliburton in the North Africa/Middle East region. He was the manager of the Knowledge Management (KM) program at Halliburton from 2001 to 2005. At that time, he pioneered the use of organizational network analysis to develop communities of practice. The success of these communities has been recognized by the various KM awards Halliburton has earned. Guillermo has been in the oil and gas industry for more than 30 years, working in a variety of roles in many countries around the world.

Carlota Vollhardt, Dipl.Psych., has more than 20 years of international experience as an organizational and clinical psychologist, helping leaders and teams acquire capabilities and knowledge essential for sustainable business performance, organizational momentum, and personal effectiveness. A major focus of her work over the past 10 years has been senior executive transitions and knowledge and innovation transfer. Before launching her own firm, Carlota was an organization development and knowledge management leader in a Fortune 50 company. Her current clients include internationally based Fortune 500 firms and nonprofits.

Terry G. Williams, MBA, is an organizational transformation principal consultant with Galloway Consulting, specializing in helping large organizations dramatically improve service, quality, and economic performance. He uses the Accelerated Corporate Transformation (ACT) methodology and ONA in his work to accelerate results and buy-in. Over almost 20 years, his 300+ clients have included large and midsize organizations in health care, government, and the private sector.

Adrian (Zeke) Wolfberg leads the Knowledge Laboratory, an enterprisewide platform for behavioral change, at the Defense Intelligence Agency. He focuses on improving leadership behavior, problem solving, teamwork, and change implementation.

INTRODUCTION

Welcome! We wrote this book as an effort to move from theory to practice in the important domain of organizational networks. Recent books have helped to explain why leaders should pay attention to informal networks, how a network analysis can yield surprising insights into how work gets done in an organization, and what principles inform a network perspective. In this book, we speak to those of you who are wondering what comes next. Having examined the networks in your organization, how can you use what you’ve learned? Having adopted a network perspective, how can you embed it into your organization’s operations? What approaches can help you either repair specific trouble spots in a network or develop the kind of collaborative environment that can yield tangible performance improvements?

Much has been written on networks and network analysis recently. In part, this is a product of social media and networking technologies, which have altered—to some degree—how people connect in and outside of organizations. But this focus on networks also seems to be a broad response to a competitive environment that has sent leaders scrambling to find new and different paradigms that will boost performance. Most leaders are desperately seeking a multiplier effect—a way to get more from their organizations’ talent and other resources. But after a decade when almost every large organization in the world adopted some form of matrix structure, applied yet another technology enabling employees to instantaneously connect, or adopted a cultural change program urging more collaboration, what we have to show for it is a lot of overloaded employees.

In response, more and more leaders are coming to understand that behind any new formal structure or collaborative technology is a web of relationships that drives growth, innovation, and overall organizational performance. Indeed, business value is increasingly created through the rapid formation (and dissolution) of networks of people who represent expertise, critical resources, and decision-making power. Using the tools and techniques of organizational network analysis (ONA), managers can map and assess these relationships between people and groups. By challenging the often implicit and flawed assumption that “more is better” when it comes to collaboration and networks, and by making visible the disconnects between existing networks and those required to support an organization’s strategy, the approach helps managers see and take action on the traditionally invisible relationships through which value is either created or depleted.

But after conducting an organizational network analysis and examining the results—perhaps seeing fragmentation between groups that need to be tightly connected, talented employees whose expertise is not sufficiently leveraged, or an excess of connectivity that is slowing everything down—leaders then ask, “Now what? What do we do with these insights? What are some effective ways to act on them?” This book is our response to those questions. Our purpose is not to advance the scholarship on organizational networks but to give leaders some practical approaches for strengthening the key networks in their organizations.

Most of the contributors to this book represent the corporate members of The Network Roundtable, a group of nearly 80 organizations—including large corporations, consulting firms, and government agencies—that formed to advance the understanding of how network analysis can be used to enhance organizational and personal performance. We asked these professionals, all of them highly sophisticated users of network ideas, to describe the most effective approaches they have used to strengthen connectivity and the organizational context in which they implemented changes. The result is not just a compilation of highly practical network-building activities; it’s also a collection of stories about organizations working to drive a paradigm shift, from a focus on formal structures to an understanding of flexible networks.

We have divided the network interventions into five thematic sections, but many of them could serve multiple purposes or could be tweaked to suit various agendas and organizational circumstances. Some of the contributors present workshops and programs in great detail, providing interventions that you could use in your own organization tomorrow. Others describe broader network-based approaches and therefore offer valuable principles and lessons. Some of the workshops and exercises presented here could work as standalone network-building activities; others could be a component of a leadership development program or of a large-scale change effort. It’s important to note that not all of the interventions must be preceded by a full organizational network analysis. Many contributors here report that although it is ideal to go into these activities with insights from an ONA, organizations can reap benefits even if they forgo that first step.

We invite you to explore all of the network-building approaches presented here and to consider which might be appropriate for your organization. In doing so, we hope that you will be better able to reap the considerable benefits that well-managed organizational networks can offer.

PART ONE

BUILDING NETWORKS FOR COLLABORATION AND COMMUNITY

The four chapters in this section start from the premise that truly worthwhile collaboration creates tangible value for an organization.

Angelique Finan and Grady Bryant describe VeriSign’s ongoing experience of bringing together the technical professionals across this geographically dispersed company into a knowledge-sharing community. The technical community, which holds an annual symposium and maintains a robust online presence, grew out of an earlier initiative to establish a network of the company’s elite engineers. The message: as you consider network building in your organization, look at what’s already going on that could be leveraged into a more comprehensive approach to knowledge sharing and community building.

Peter Gray and Dan Ranta lay out the principles that guide ConocoPhillips in creating “Networks of Excellence” (NoEs), internal communities of practice intended to encourage knowledge sharing. Articulating roles and responsibilities, attending to the network’s daily operations, and working to institute a culture that supports the exchange of knowledge are all crucial, but at ConocoPhillips, the foundational principle of network building is this: a Network of Excellence must demonstrate its ability to contribute significant value, either in cost savings or in revenue generation.

That requirement also informs the communities of practice at Halliburton, write Rob Cross and Guillermo Velasquez. Communities of Practice (CoPs) can be more than groups of like-minded professionals who keep one another up to date in their field. If carefully designed, these communities can boost organizational performance. The authors describe how Halliburton uses organizational network analysis (ONA) to strengthen CoPs by identifying brokers who can draw in peripheral members and contribute specific expertise, and by building an awareness of the knowledge that resides in the community.

In the final chapter in this section, Myra Norton lays out a detailed process for identifying the individuals in a client organization who have the greatest influence on purchasing decisions. Using the example of an information technology company that followed this process to increase sales, customer loyalty, and customer satisfaction, Norton describes in detail how the tools and techniques of ONA can give salespeople unique insight into the “influence networks” within client organizations.

CHAPTER ONE

BUILDING A TECHNICAL COMMUNITY

Angelique Finan and Grady Bryant

The first years of the twenty-first century were a period of tremendous growth for VeriSign, a provider of Internet infrastructure services. By late 2006, the company comprised 15 business units operating out of 73 locations globally. This growth was in part the result of 47 acquisitions. VeriSign, originally focused on digital certificates, took on a variety of Internet and telecom businesses, including Internet-based payment processing, management of the .com and .net registries, international mobile phone roaming services, mobile phone payment services, management of customer premise security devices, Voice over IP (VOIP) services, SS7 signaling services, and distribution of digital content.

Forming a coherent company out of all those acquisitions was a challenge. It’s a simple matter to sketch out a new org chart but much more difficult to align cultures, loyalties, goals, and operating processes, and to capture the hearts and minds of employees. Many of VeriSign’s acquisitions had operated in the fast and loose startup environment and so were accustomed to autonomy. Especially for very young, very small companies, it’s difficult to give up your identity to become part of a larger, more mature organization.

We at VeriSign knew that to accomplish our mission—developing, securing, and operating some of the world’s most critical electronic infrastructure—we had to maintain the trust and confidence of the public. That, in turn, meant that employees needed to be well connected and engaged. Unless we made a concerted effort to develop connections among people representing acquired companies, we would be unable to leverage talent across the organization, develop standards for problem solving and for system architecture and software, formulate and adopt best practices, share new ideas and technologies across the organization, and achieve operational excellence. Also, if our employees did not come together in some sort of community, we would be unable to develop a strong brand identity, and we would risk losing our most talented employees, who might not feel they had anything at stake in the company’s mission or any important relationships within the organization.

VeriSign′s Goals for a Technical Community

To engage employees and build connections among them, we needed a program that would cross organizational boundaries to help the globally distributed workforce meet the company’s mission. The program we launched was called the VeriSign Technical Community. This community included all technical employees, representing all engineering disciplines as well as technical project management and technical management, who came together both face to face at an annual symposium and virtually, through an online platform called the Matrix.

The VeriSign Technical Community program had several goals:

Improve employee engagement, professional development, and job satisfaction. Engaged employees feel a sense of purpose and connection with the corporate mission. They invest their free time in the company and increase morale by exciting others. They are also less likely to leave and more likely to care deeply about their work. To feel a sense of engagement, employees need opportunities and a platform to share their ideas, accomplishments, and plans. And those who truly excel need rewards and recognition.

Foster a culture of knowledge sharing, collaboration (within and across projects), joint problem solving, and innovation. People may be naturally inclined to work together, but the company must help employees find one another, form lasting connections, and, perhaps most important, develop trust in one another. Trust is especially essential for innovation; employees will not share their new ideas unless they feel safe doing so.

Better integrate newly acquired, geographically dispersed companies. When new groups show up on an org chart armed with nothing more than a press release, a new set of benefits, and a new logo on their paycheck, there are many more questions than answers. Legacy employees may not seem interested in the new acquisition, and the new employees may feel isolated, unsure how they fit in and what to do to fix the situation. Giving all employees ways to connect and share is essential to a more complete and functional integration.

Strategy and Approach

The goals and objectives for the Technical Community program didn’t occur to us overnight. They were deeply informed by our experiences in an earlier initiative to develop a common software framework for engineering teams. Because use of the framework was optional, we needed to involve the teams in the development process. We started small, first with a cross-functional steering committee to guide the framework, and later with a group of the company’s elite engineers to widen the net.

The group of elite engineers met face to face every six months at what we called the VeriSign Software Engineering Summit (VSES), a two-day event that featured an external technology speaker, typically an author or the developer of a well-known technology. The summit involved a recreational activity that afforded networking time and an opportunity for attendees to deliver a presentation on their work area.

As we witnessed the level of engagement of the attendees and the increasing popularity of the event, we realized that we were on to something. People who may have otherwise never met were now reaching out to one another for help and advice. They looked forward to upcoming summits and played an active role in the planning. E-mail was flowing.

Although e-mail is a very useful tool, we envisioned something more. Our goal was to organize the discussion about the software framework in a way that could engage all software engineers in the company, not just those who attended the VSES. This goal sparked the idea of an online community for the company’s technicians. We also started thinking that if the VSES could provide many benefits to a relatively small number of people, maybe there was something we could do on a much larger scale, perhaps with as many as 250 participants. This thinking led to the VeriSign Technical Symposium (VTS).

The VeriSign Technical Symposium—Bringing People Face to Face

The VTS is a key element of the VeriSign Technical Community program. It’s a multiday, multitrack annual event at which representatives from all organizations with technical employees meet face to face. Attendees have the opportunity to network with their colleagues and learn more about best practices, proven technologies, latest projects, and innovations throughout VeriSign.

In building a technical community, we want to provide all of our technical people with both face-to-face and online opportunities to share, connect, and collaborate. We see great value in bringing employees together to network and build relationships, and then sustaining those connections and conversations in an online community in which a broader audience can participate.

The First Symposium In 2006, we held our first VeriSign Technical Symposium to promote discovery, discussion, and knowledge transfer within the technical community. A gathering of this size requires considerable investment, and that can happen only with the full support of an executive sponsor. With modest success under our belt in engaging software engineers at the VSES, we were fortunate to gain the support of the company’s CTO. We soon learned, however, that we had more selling to do. Getting lower-level management to commit the time of their people to attend an unknown event was more difficult than we had expected. And employees themselves were reluctant to leave their busy jobs for a few days. To overcome this, we targeted mid-level and upper-level management and enlisted Corporate Communications to get the word out. This helped seed the first event, after which the word spread virally. From then on, there was a healthy demand for attendee slots.

The agenda was packed with presentations from all levels of the organization. From keynotes by our CEO and CTO, attendees gained valuable insights into the company’s strategy and vision. Through several panel presentations, they heard about projects and technologies used in different technical organizations. During presentations by their peers, they could take a deep dive into various topics.

In addition to promoting knowledge sharing, we wanted attendees to network with their colleagues from other parts of the organization. We developed various activities to encourage this. In one networking game, each attendee received cards with the names and photos of two attendees from different parts of the organization and were given a few questions to ask, such as “What do you like best about working at VeriSign?” and “What are your hobbies and outside interests?” Attendees who tracked down their assigned people and collected answers were entered into raffles for high-tech gadgets. Attendees also participated in recreational activities such as golf and kayaking, which helped them get to know one another in a more relaxed environment.

Symposium attendees also enjoyed watching the live finals of our annual Code Fest competition. For several months leading up to the symposium, we held a series of online coding competitions, powered by the company Top Coder. Employees from all over the company competed in these online matches, and the winner of each match advanced to the onsite finals. During the symposium, computer stations were set up on stage in the center of a large room, where the finalists were given a limited amount of time to code solutions to three problems in Java, C++, or C#. Computer monitors were located around the room so attendees could watch the finalists at work. They cheered their colleagues on as results were tabulated and winners were announced.

During the Code Fest finals, tables were set up around the room manned by various organizations and individuals. This gave attendees a targeted yet informal opportunity to get to know about initiatives other than their own.

Feedback and Modification Following the first symposium, we surveyed attendees, many of whom noted that the event helped them connect with colleagues in different parts of the company and develop a better understanding of the many kinds of technical work performed within VeriSign.

Fortunately, attendees at the first symposium carried their positive experience back to their colleagues, and we never had a problem filling the slots again. For future symposiums, we received more and more submissions to present technical presentations, and being invited to the symposium is now considered a big perk.

Based on the feedback we received, we made modifications to the symposium format. Due to the incredible interest in presenting, we added more technical presentations, tracks, and Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) sessions—90-minute informal discussions on a topic led by a knowledgeable facilitator.

We also formalized the role of the symposium Planning Committee, which is made up of representatives from all of the company’s technical organizations who play an active role in promoting VTS participation. They encourage employees to submit presentations and assist them with their submissions. They also have the tough job of reviewing submissions for technical presentations and BoF sessions, and ultimately selecting them. Committee members then work with presenters to prepare for the symposium, provide feedback, and facilitate their sessions onsite.

Today, the annual VeriSign Technical Symposium is a cornerstone of the technical community. The two-and-a-half-day event is attended by about 200 employees representing all technical organizations, including sales and customer support. Our senior leadership provides the keynote. Multiple tracks of technical presentations focus on the various disciplines in our community, such as software engineering, database engineering, security, and quality engineering.

The technical presentations showcase the talents of our engineers, who receive considerable recognition for being selected. Presenting at the symposium is a great developmental opportunity for our technical people. They put a lot of effort into preparing their presentations and get lots of support from their teams. Several of our engineers have taken their technical presentations to national conferences, such as JavaOne and Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG).

Each VeriSign Technical Symposium concludes with an awards ceremony announcing winners of CTO Awards, which recognize employees for their outstanding contributions to the company in the areas of individual technical excellence, team technical excellence, and technical leadership.

The event seems to have helped achieve one of our goals for the community program: engaging employees. As one attendee wrote on a feedback form, “I was more energized about the company and my role in the success of it than I have been in the past two years I’ve been with the company.”

Building an Online Community

The other central component of our community is an online platform and suite of tools, called the Matrix, which lets community members connect, share, and collaborate. The name captures what we aim to do: connect globally and organizationally distributed people with similar skills and interests and enable them to better collaborate and share information.

Launching the Matrix The Matrix initially consisted of blogs, forums, an event calendar, tags, RSS feeds, comments, and user profiles that display members’ photos, skills, expertise, and personal interests. We used the open source software Drupal to provide these capabilities. We added the Vault, a central metadata repository for reusable assets, such as code components, white papers, best practices, and scripts to promote reuse and knowledge sharing.

Before we launched the Matrix, we introduced it at the first VeriSign Technical Symposium. The 100 attendees were our beta users. During a general session, we gave demonstrations of the Matrix and tried to excite people about contributing to it so that there would be some interesting content when the online community was officially launched. We held raffles to get VTS attendees to complete their online profiles, and we asked them for feedback. We hoped that they would be our evangelists for using the new tool.

After we had some interesting posts, such as trip reports from technical conferences and blogs discussing building effective teams and announcing the availability of technical resources, we launched it to the broader technical community. We teamed up with the company’s internal communications group, which was enthusiastic about fostering grassroots communications in the company. The group promoted the Matrix and tech community events on the intranet and in targeted newsletters and e-mails.

In the ensuing months, we held three open houses in our Mt. View, Dulles, and Bangalore locations. We invited people to enjoy some afternoon refreshments, network with their colleagues, and learn more about the Matrix. We demoed the Matrix and talked about the goals of the technical community. We set up stations around the room, where attendees could complete their profiles and enter into raffles. At this point, more than one-half of our technical community had completed profiles. We also received support from the many managers who encouraged employees to complete their profiles and contribute content to the Matrix.

Maintaining and Improving the Matrix The online community continues to grow both in participation and in its ability to foster collaboration and transparency. We made a giant leap forward with the addition of a wiki to the Matrix toolset. We selected Confluence as the wiki software. Due to its flexibility, extensibility, and ease of use, it’s been widely adopted within our technical organizations, especially in product development. Project teams use it for team workspaces. Technical writers love it for collaborating on technical documents. Project managers maintain dashboards to monitor and publish project status. Program managers publish information to market their programs. Development teams integrate it with other development tools for issue tracking and continuous integration.

Not only is the wiki a great collaborative tool, but also it does a superb job allowing people to stay in touch with projects, programs, and groups across the company. When we added the wiki, we decided to implement it in a way that would promote transparency in the community. We wanted people to be able to learn about other projects, technologies, and organizations by browsing other groups’ wikis. So unless there was a need to keep information confidential, we encouraged space owners to keep their spaces open.

We’ve found that such cross-functional transparency is a vital part of knowledge building and sharing within the company. One senior technical leader said that browsing the Matrix is a key resource for her to keep up to speed with what’s going on in many of our projects. Community members see the value and promote openness.

To keep our tech community coming back to the Matrix, we must keep talking about it and making people aware of what’s being shared on it. We reach out to subject matter experts to get answers to questions in the forums. We also use e-mail newsletters to keep community members informed of discussions and information being shared in blogs and forums. Contributors to the Matrix are entered into monthly raffles and recognized for their contributions. We use an RSS feed to integrate into the community platform content from the wiki that would be of interest to the whole community.

We also need to ensure that the tools we provide continue to meet the needs of our users. At VeriSign, we have a small team of engineers who promote the development and adoption of common components and best practices, and support the technical community toolset, its advancement, and adoption. We also provide training and orientation for new employees and consult with groups on how to best use the wiki.

Enhancing and Expanding the Community

We constantly seek feedback from the community. We use that feedback, which comes in a number of forms, both solicited and unsolicited, to shape our future actions. We also use the feedback and metrics collected from the online community as a measure of success. You have to know your community to keep it vibrant and engaged. We believe that both the Matrix and VTS have increased knowledge sharing, collaboration, and networking capabilities among VeriSign technicians. We’ve also witnessed the launch of additional subcommunities in the areas of quality engineering and software architecture.

We’ve enhanced the social networking and community-building capabilities and improved the usability of our platform. We wanted to provide more Facebook-like features to allow employees to make connections and form interest groups. Jive Software’s Social Business Software, which we’ve selected as the platform, supports multiple communities, groups, blogging, user customization, forums, and “friending.”

We have recently implemented these capabilities companywide in the belief that all employees can benefit from improved knowledge sharing. When we upgraded the technical community platform, we allowed people to test it before we rolled it out to the entire company. We hope the platform will promote greater cross-functional transparency and allow employees to make more connections with their colleagues throughout the company.

The VeriSign technical community still maintains its own presence on the Matrix but so do the customer support and web properties communities. And we expect other communities to form. In addition, numerous collaborative groups and social interest groups have been created, a greater number of thought leaders are blogging, and employees are connecting with each other and enhancing their profiles. Our ability to roll this out companywide has been bolstered by an executive leadership team that values hearing from its employees, is committed to building a culture of trust and employee empowerment, and supports multiple communication channels—top down, peer-to-peer, and bottom up.

CHAPTER TWO

NETWORKS OF EXCELLENCE

Peter Gray and Dan Ranta

Smart managers intuitively understand the importance of the problems that knowledge management efforts are often designed to address: sprinkled across most organizations are people doing similar kinds of work, but they often remain unaware of one another’s expertise, successes, and failures. Some of this lack of awareness is the result of waves of downsizing, reorganizations, leadership changes, and new acquisitions. But even in the best-managed large organizations, employees who could benefit from one another’s experiences are often isolated by formal structures and mechanisms that subdivide work into different reporting channels and focus employees on local rather than global goals.

Although formal structure is generally meant to ensure accountability for the execution of work, it often neglects employees’ ad hoc and unsystematic needs to talk to colleagues working on similar problems. To address this gap, leaders have been urged to seed and support informal communities of practice, which provide a forum for birds of a feather, as the saying goes, to flock together.

Communities of practice have emerged in a variety of shapes and forms, but they all grapple with the same problem: how do we best help employees who are geographically dispersed tap one another’s experience and expertise? Many firms have launched electronic discussion spaces to provide a virtual meeting place. Unfortunately, technology-enabled communities rarely live up to their billing. However simple it may seem to connect people electronically, online discussion forums often rely on the energy of one or two people. When those people lose interest or change departments, the entire forum can die a sudden death. With a few notable exceptions, such initiatives generally succeed in creating the online structures that employees could use to communicate with one another, but they fail to attract and sustain an engaged member base. They become digital ghost towns; visitors stop by for a quick look and, finding no activity, leave. Those who do post questions receive few answers, and because activity levels are low, those answers often come days or weeks after they were needed.

It has become conventional wisdom that a “build it and they will come” approach is naïve and that effective knowledge management is more about people and processes than it is about technology. Yet managers still grapple with what this means: Which people? What processes? And how can managers make sure that a community is focused on a measurable, sustainable, and attention-grabbing business impact?

Excellence Networks at ConocoPhillips

In 2004, ConocoPhillips faced these questions and many others as it launched a large initiative to create internal communities of practice that would enhance knowledge sharing within the firm. For this international integrated energy company with thousands of job sites (often quite remote) spread across 30 countries, the challenge of sharing knowledge was very real—and the potential payoff was large. Facing fierce competition on all fronts, ConocoPhillips knew that to continue on its success trajectory, it needed to rapidly and effectively harness the knowledge of its highly skilled but geographically distributed workforce. Instead of assuming that technology either was the solution or was irrelevant when creating online communities, senior managers understood that effective global communities required new processes, roles, cultures, and technologies. They also recognized that each had to be focused on solving difficult business challenges.

With more than 10,000 employees participating in about 100 of what ConocoPhillips calls “Networks of Excellence” (NoEs) as of the writing of this chapter, and a growth rate of about 10 new networks per year, the company has developed a set of valuable principles for identifying, nurturing, and enabling these topic-focused communities. A culture of knowledge sharing has emerged in which network members take responsibility for helping their globally distributed colleagues—even if they meet face to face only once or twice a year.

Financial Returns

More than four years after the first NoEs were launched, ConocoPhillips can point to specific networks that have documented annual cost savings and revenue generation in the millions of dollars (and some even in the tens of millions of dollars).

Savings can include cost avoidance. For example, consider a ConocoPhillips NoE called the Upstream Rotating Equipment Network. In 2008, an employee in Indonesia posted a question to the network’s online portal inquiring whether it was safe to extend the run time of a power turbine beyond its scheduled maintenance overhaul. As things stood, the scheduled timing of the overhaul would have halted production while the turbine, and the gas compressor it drove, were temporarily shut down. Expert engineers in Alaska, Australia, and the corporate engineering group all responded, indicating it was both safe and permissible to continue running the equipment as long as the power it produced was acceptable and vibration levels were below alarm limits. By temporarily extending the turbine’s run time and deferring the overhaul to a more opportune time, the Indonesian unit avoided millions of dollars in additional lost production without compromising safety.

The company’s NoEs can also help generate new revenue. For example, in 2008, workers at the Belanak production platform in Indonesia needed to shut down crude-oil cooling equipment every two weeks to remove wax buildups that, if left untreated, could cause problematic pressure drops. But this involved a time-consuming solvent soaking process. Members of the Facility Optimization Network at Belanak reached out through the network and found a solution using thermal cycling to melt the wax, which allowed them to increase production by 104,000 barrels per year.

Four Principles of Effective Networks

In the remainder of this chapter, we focus on the principles ConocoPhillips followed to develop the vibrant and effective networks that have resulted in these kinds of cost savings and revenue generation. In the following, we group these principles according to the question they address:

1. What key decisions determine whether a new network should be formed?

2. What kinds of roles are necessary to ensure network success?

3. How can a company establish the kind of knowledge-sharing culture that networks require?

4. How does the day-to-day network operation maximize benefits and minimize efforts for all involved?

ConocoPhillips’ unique combination of approaches in each of these four areas provides the backbone of its network effort and the blueprint for its success going forward.

The following sections expand on each principle.

Network Formation

Ensuring that each new network has the greatest chance to succeed is a process that begins long before the network is formed. Many authors and consultants stress the informal nature of such communities, arguing that any attempt to systematize them will crush them. ConocoPhillips found the exact opposite—that without clear and explicit links to the organization and its business purpose, networks often evolve in ways that fail to contribute to business goals. The company adheres to two fundamental principles in this regard.

First, no network is created without a clear and detailed business case that specifies the value proposition to the company and is agreed on by network leaders and members. Insisting on a business case prior to the creation of a network goes against the typical “let a thousand flowers bloom” approach that is often promoted. But in many cases, uncontrolled growth of new networks saps employees’ attention and engagement, leading to neglect and network failure. Setting a high bar at the outset means that every potential new network must have a strong business justification, which signals to potential leaders and members that the result will not be something that consumes their time without producing real business value. For example, in the case of the Upstream Rotating Equipment Network, leaders set out specific and challenging performance improvement goals for turbines, compressors, and pumps.

Second, proposals for new networks must clearly specify the kinds of deliverables that will be produced through the ongoing operation of the network and the specific kinds of activities that it will support. Deliverables (such as research reports and reusable work products) and activities (such as electronic discussions and teleconferences) must relate directly to the business case and support the attainment of business goals. A high degree of focus on these two areas helps separate the wheat from the chaff, leading new network proponents away from fuzzy “more is better” claims about collaboration and toward specific activities that produce a solid payoff for the collective investment of time.

Following these two principles means that, ultimately, ConocoPhillips managers provide each new network—through its business case, its deliverables, and its activities—with a clear operating model that connects it to the overall Exploration and Production business objectives. The principles have a profound effect on the nature and character of networks at ConocoPhillips: aligning them with organizational priorities, helping members understand how they can affect important business goals, providing clear justification for why members should invest their time in the network (how the network melds with their “day jobs ”), and shifting the idea of knowledge sharing away from an abstract idea and toward a concrete set of measurable objectives. As a result, networks have become a cornerstone of ConocoPhillips’ ability to reach its business goals and deliver additional value through global collaboration and expertise sharing.

Network Roles and Responsibilities

Conventional wisdom holds that for a community to succeed, its members must truly feel ownership of the community, which motivates a range of behaviors that are necessary for its success. Studies suggest that leaders naturally emerge over time as conversations happen among members and as those who care the most about the success of the community step forward. As with its network formation experience, ConocoPhillips found out early in the process that this conventional wisdom actually harmed the company’s efforts. When members saw a swirling, unfocused mass of interactions, they had trouble seeing how they fit in.

The company therefore went against the traditional perspective by explicitly formalizing a range of roles and responsibilities at the outset of a new network. Taking advantage of the decentralized nature of the firm, which has autonomous business units around the world, each NoE was built by allocating roles such as leaders and core team members to individuals across geographic locations, thereby creating a new kind of linking mechanism. The four main roles are sponsor, leader, coordinator, and core member.

Sponsor

Successful networks have a sponsor, a senior mid-level manager who may be selected by an appropriate business leader but may also be a self-selected champion or a subject matter expert (SME). Network sponsors work closely with network leaders to charter and champion the network, and they coordinate with senior management and business units to ensure that the network is focused on strategically valuable goals and improvement opportunities. They provide the foundation, direction, and governance that attract the masses to participate in network activities, with a goal of fostering widespread interest and enthusiasm for knowledge sharing and network participation.

During a network’s developmental stages, sponsors provide input and validate the business case, participate in the network assessment process, and refine the operating model as the general ConocoPhillips approach to networks is customized for their needs. As the network matures, sponsors and leaders guide improvements and make sure that participants are being served, goals are measured and met, and adequate resources are applied.

Leader

For a network to be successful from the beginning, it must have a formal leader. Often selected by sponsors and then approved by the business, these mid-level individuals leverage relationships with others in an effort to guide the direction of the network’s knowledge-sharing goals and objectives. Leaders provide active support (as opposed to vocal yet passive support) by helping design the network and removing any organizational obstacles.

Connecting globally dispersed units is not easy, and network leaders are key to knitting together efforts across a set of decentralized business units to ensure buy-in from locations around the world. Leaders are also crucial in encouraging SMEs, network members, and other thought leaders to participate and take on roles that promote knowledge sharing. Leaders help create the business case, assess the network’s effectiveness, and hone its operating model. They must be willing to “manage up” because they may be informally directing network members who are above them in the company’s formal hierarchy.

Coordinator

Successful networks at ConocoPhillips also have a local coordinator,