Business Transformation with a Network-based approach
On the other day, I had a mastermind session with my friend who is an Agile Transformation Coach, helping businesses to move from state A to state B.
He had some problems around mapping out the processes, communication networks, tools, habits and at the end integrating it all into one comprehensive picture which could be leveraged.
The heath of the problem is, if you go into this with an SQL/excel background you will lose your hair on the seer complexity and the ever-changing available data. It is a mess, as life nearly always.
When I looked at my friend’s problem I realized: Oh there are entities in this business space, there are relationships between then, what if we are changing our approach to a network-based one? Can we draw this down somehow? Can we break down the silos?
After 30 minutes of furious drawing, rapid back-and-forth questions, we realized you can add any new type of entity to it, you can merge and slice every network, moreover, it’s easily explainable with a whiteboard, to any business stakeholder.
Okay nice drawing but what about scale? Comes the question. The answer lies in some digital solutions. For example, you can easily integrate your organization chart and your email communication network into a graph database (I use Neo4j, but there are plenty other) and you can explore it at scale (and realize how the two differ from each other). You can also import the WhoIsWorkingOnWhatProject and the communication graph to uncover where are the silos with some label propagation on a macro and micro scale (not to mention other graph algorithms and some machine/deep learning or graph data).
Moreover, only with the communication graph, you can see where are the choke points, and who is playing email ping-pong, which should be only a push of a button in some app. And the list goes on and on.
Conclusion:
My friend left our conversations with an A3 page of notes, and ideas, which made me happy and I cannot wait to help and see how organizations will utilize their untapped data with a network-based approach.
If you would like to work with me to uncover what a network-based approach could do to your problems please hit me up on contact[at]apexai.info.
If you have any questions, feedback, ideas please let me know.
