Secrets of Successful IT Teams: Socially Connected Employees

The first step in Randle's Social Network Analysis was to survey everyone in his organization. He asked only four questions:

• Who do you go to for advice or information when assessing a difficult problem or discussing ideas?
• Who do you depend on to get your job done?
• Who do you communicate with most frequently? and
• Who is your most valued contact within XO IT Operations?

Each person was allowed to name up to three people from within the IT Operations department in response to each question. The answers to the survey were used to generate a set of network diagrams called sociograms similar in form to a router network diagram. In a sociogram, the network nodes represent people, and the connections between nodes indicate communication between individuals.

One sociogram showed nodes that were sized according to the number of ties connecting an individual. "It was immediately apparent which people were central to my organization and who had many ties to others on my team," says Randle. "This showed me those who were strong communicators and sharers."

In social network analysis, what Randle saw intuitively is called centrality-a measurement used to define the person's relative importance to an organization based on his location in the network. Centrality takes different forms. Degree centrality counts the number of ties a node has to others and is used to measure a person's overall activity in the network. Betweeness centrality shows the degree to which a person connects different groups, thus controlling information flow across the network. Closeness centrality is based on the number of hops it takes for a node to traverse the entire network, and it indicates a person's access to resources.

These centrality measures enabled Randle to view his organization from varying perspectives and identify important traits of both people and departments.

Evaluating the Team

The SNA revealed both positive traits and potential problems within Randle's organization. He found that there were individuals in all four of his IT Operations departments that demonstrated high degrees of all three centrality types. Randle was pleased to find that his Enterprise Network department was highly connected to all teams within IT Operations at both a management and individual contributor level. This high connectivity of the Enterprise Network department was especially important to Randle because it's a function that all his other teams rely on.

But Randle also noticed that as in many other organizations, there were silos within his IT Operations organization. He found groups that were jointly responsible for key IT-wide initiatives that could increase their communication to benefit these projects. And there were cross-functional groups that could perform more efficiently by better connections with the teams they supported.

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