Preview - Prof. Kathleen R. Carley (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA

The saying it is not who you know, but what who you know speaks to the power of intangible resources. This work goes a step further by also showing the power of what who you know does and what resources they have at their disposal. I have long espoused the value of these high dimensional or meta-networks and their dynamics for understanding real-world issues. These ideas are operationalized in a sophisticated toolkit for high-dimension network analysis, visualization, and what-if analysis referred to as ORA. I teach ORA and this approach at Carnegie Mellon University during the CASOS Summer Institute (SI). This is how I met Anna. She was a participant in 2015. She instantly grasped the power of this approach and its value for understanding organizations. This book came out of that beginning. In this book, Organizational Network Analysis: Auditing Intangible Resources , Anna goes far beyond the basic methodologies. She situates this approach by building on the theories that underlie team science and resource management. She empirically grounds this approach and builds relevance through numerous real-world examples. In these examples, she shows in detail how to apply dynamic meta-networks to realworld organizations and describes what new insights this application brings to our understanding of the organization at work. She helps the reader understand how network forces impact performance at all levels and across humans and intangible resources. It has long been recognized that informal networks of who talks to whom are key to promotion, to how things get done, and to organizational gaps. This book is unique in that it goes several steps further and builds on the networks connecting people, resources, knowledge, and tasks to each other. This broader perspective is critical for understanding the organization at work. Using this perspective one can measure and reason about policies for effecting organizational needs such as workload distribution, congruence, team stability, and just-in-time teaming. Illustrative examples show how this meta-network approach enables corporate leaders to manage intangible resources as they hire new personnel, reorganize, and build connections among groups. Going still another step the author shows how the application of dynamic network analysis provides the manager or researcher with a merged picture of the fl ow of information and knowledge through the organization. Anna has moved organizational network analysis beyond simple assessment of informal networks into the realm of high-dimensional (meta-network) and dynamic network analytics. As such she is able to provide a sophisticated, usable, and practical approach to auditing intangible resources. The universality of the approach means that the metrics and processes are relevant to any organization or group, even one composed of humans and robots. Scientists and practitioners will fi nd this book of value – as it contains both methodological contributions and detailed practical applications. It provides a promising and systematic data-driven approach for addressing the challenges of identifi cation, measurement, and evaluation of organizational resources. The methods used are sophisticated, but easily understood and employed by doctoral students and MBAs. The approach is scalable and can be used both at the small team level such as a group of fi ve to coordination across the entire space of GitHub. All in all, this is a key contribution to team science. Earl Nightingale once said, “All you need is the plan, the roadmap, and the courage to press on to your destination.” In this book, Anna has given organizational scholars and practitioners the roadmap. Enjoy. Dr. Kathleen M. Carley Prof. of Societal Computing Director of the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS) at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. August, 2019