Bringing SNA into Mainstream Business
Dr. Laurence Lock Lee (Optimice Pty Ltd) — Cai Kjaer (OpenKnowledge Australia, Optimice Pty Ltd)
Bringing SNA into Mainstream Business
While the science of SNA has been with us for close to 80 years, the business of SNA is still trivially small. Of the some 500,000 management consulting firms in the world today, just a fraction of 1% offer SNA services. So what is the problem?
If we look at the biggest ideas that dominate the offerings of the major management consulting firms we will invariably find services around Benchmarking, Balanced Scorecards, Six Sigma, Lean Manufacturing, Business Process Management, Knowledge and Information Management, Enterprise Systems, Outsourcing, Strategic Planning, Innovation Management, Supply Chain Management and the like. How do they differ from SNA? As Davenport and Prusak wrote in their book on “What’s the Big Idea” , most successful business ideas are ‘idea practitioner’ led. This is also the case for the majority of management consulting services. Davenport and Prusak open their book by contrasting the fortunes of the scientist led Westinghouse and the business innovator led GE conglomerates. Only one is thriving today.
SNA has a rich research heritage, as evidenced by the thriving INSNA research community. Intellectually stimulating and relevant across a breadth of disciplines, from psychology, computer science, organisational science, health science, management, SNA continues to hold popular appeal in the research community. But is it the science heritage that is holding SNA back in the business world? Are SNA consulting projects being continually framed as research projects? Are potential clients and consultants fearful of having inadequate skills or expertise to conduct the analysis? Is it time for us to mature SNA from requiring academic rigor to business impact?
As a point of comparison I would offer Six Sigma as an interesting case in point. The name suggests a strong statistical heritage. In normal circumstances the word ‘statistics’ would generate fear and feelings of inadequacy in the business community. Yet for Motorola, who is credited with its invention, Six Sigma is substantially about simple tools that are in reach of virtually all business practitioners, with the more sophisticated statistics only surfacing at the higher levels of certification. The key achievement for Motorola and subsequently the plethora of Six Sigma adopters is that the tools and responsibilities were taken away from the specialists in the quality control department and put into the hands of the business practitioners.
If SNA is to head down a similar path we need to also make this transformation. The language of SNA needs to change from the scientific terms of degree centralities, betweenness, closeness, densities, structural equivalence etc… to the language of business. Davenport and Prusak talk about the three classic business objectives of Efficiency, Effectiveness and Innovation that underlie the majority of successful business ideas. They go on to classify different ideas against each of the above. Not surprisingly, SNA does not appear on their list. Yet SNA can and has contributed strongly to all three of the classic objectives.
In this paper we explore a number of SNA case studies where we have devised some simple tools to address the classic business objectives as identified above. Our intent is to come up with a standard set of tools that reflect the power of SNA, but in the context of classic business objectives like efficiency, effectiveness and innovation. In linking SNA results to the classic business objectives we have made some propositions that we articulate here. We are happy to engage in constructive discussion to hopefully achieve a robust suite of SNA tools for the business practitioner. What Motorola achieved with Six Sigma, we now need to do with SNA.
