Increasing Proactivity and Reactivity with efficient intra-company networks
Overview
The Importance of effictive and efficient communication
Relevent data and information is critical for any company and individual to optimize their decision making, it is an assumption of a market economy due to its ability to influence the decision making process. If at any point there is an obstruction or/and an uneven distribution of information, it can significantly hinder a person or the overall company, leading to individuals making choices that are not the best for the company and possibly lead to its downfall.
On the other hand, a company, entity, or individual with the proper information will be able to make fast paced decisions and react in an optimal way to complex multivariate market conditions. In this case it could be a video game company determining what changes to implement to increase fan base loyalty and overall lifetime value of its customers.
Thus, relevent information is important for overall decision making and the synergy of the team and will attribute to the success of the company.
Executive Summary
Improvements in chains of communication:
There are possible improvements that can be implented to increase the overall communication between departments which should, theoretically, have a significant amount of synergy.
- Despite being the smallest department, the marketing department disproportionately has the lowest porportion of messages. In particularly, the department sends the lowest quantity and proportion of messages than any other department, while in theory, the marketing department should communicate with the operations and sales department.
- Feedback loops should be created so that departments can hold each other accountable, develop specific, measurable goals, determine department performance, and increase inter-department collaboration.
- The engineering department and the IT department both have low rates of communication relative to their size. And, they should have a high degree of communication with one another as there can be a lot of overlap between the two departments.
- Employee networks should be restructured to restrict the flow of irrelevant information and to increase the flow of relevant information.
Analysis of Department Networks
Directional Communication Networks between Departments
In a company, its components perform specialized tasks in order to increase the efficiency of the overall company and its goals. In this case, a component is represented by the department and graphically, represented by a node/vertex.
The first graph presented above, each line connecting the vertices, edges, denoted a message sent from one department to another. While in the second graph, the weight of the edge represents the amount of messages send between the different departments. Both graphs show that there is a significant amount of communication occuring between the operation, sales, and administrative departments with less messages being sent to and coming from marketing, engineering, and the IT departments. Although both graph shows that there is a lack of communication between departments that need to work strongly together, it can be seen clearly in the second graph when the quantity of messages are used as weights.
Marketing
Marketing may be the most expendable department of the company, but having an effective and efficient marketing team with direction and intent will increase the efficacy of the sales team leading to sales growth and company success. This overall process is what can be the critical point for a busienss to thrive.
It is almost given that the sales and marketing teams should be working closely together as the marketing team generates leads and the sales team converts the leads into customers. When the marketing and sales team are disjointed leads will get lost within the system, marketing campaigns may not be fully successful because they are not congruent with customer needs or because sales members are not properly enacting them. The sales team can also provide on the ground feedback of the efficacy of a marketing campaign and important mathematical feed back like lifetime value of a customer or overall sales per transaction.
Moreover, the there should be a high quantity messages being sent to the operations department and the administrative departments because marketing needs to understand the fiscal impacts that their compaigns have or new methods of lead generation. These fiscal impacts can be in the form of determining the rate of return for marketing spending, the customer aquesition costs, and the change or revenue over different marketing campaigns.
Engineering and IT
The two other departments with an overall low messaging rate are the engineering and IT department, both of which should also be working closely together since both fields are computer intensive. Although, the type of engineering isnt given, whether it is software engineering, product engineering, or another variation, the department needs to communicate extensively with IT. This is because the information technology department sets up and maintains computer infastructure, and system capabilities, upgrades, changes, and maintanance should be communicated with the engineer department.
Influence of Departments (Centrality)
Centrality is a term that refers to the importance of node is within the structure of a network and can embody a number of measurements. In a communication network, centrality is important to understand because it is critical to understand the flow of information within the company. If the information is inhibited in the network, not all departments will be working with the same amount of information and it can lead to chaotic outcomes.
Quantity of Messages sent and received by Department
An aspect the column plot visually emphasizes is that the marketing, IT, and the engineering departments receive significantly more messages then they send. It is possible that these messages do not necessitate a reply as they could be requests or improvements. However, once the details of the messages are addressed, these departments should be replying with an estimated time to fix something or inquiring for feedback to further improve systems and methods. It is especially important for departments like engineering and IT to create a feedback loop to ensure that the systems and software is stable and to strive to improve them.
Another notable statistic that can be derived from the column plot is the degree out, the degree in, and total degree of each department, sent, received and total respectively. This measurement of centrality is a count of how many edges each node.
A lollipop chart is presented to show the difference between the ratios of sent and received messages be department. A horizontal line is place around the value of 1 because, naturally, in a messaging system, most people would have a reply ratio closer of 1 to 1 as the most constructive conversations would have close to equitable inputs from all parties. The chart above shows that the departments in red are disparagingly less than 1. Although the optimal ratio cannot be said for certain, a movement towards a ratio of .5 to .75 would be a significant improvement.
Betweenness Centrality of Departments
Betweenness centrality is used to measure the shortest path between the nodes and determines, the more short paths a node contains, the more important it is to the network and critical to the flow of information.