But before this reorganization, Gulas, who spearheaded the IT centralization plan, decided to run an SNA to see how the groups were connected. The SNA was completed in September 2003, and the results, he says, clearly showed how the ERP group was cut off from the rest of IT, working in almost complete isolation. The analysis found that there was more collaboration between IT staff in Europe and Asia than within the 20-person ERP division. And because of this isolation, he says, there was little collaboration with users of the ERP software, and the ERP group got a reputation of being hard to work with. "People sometimes don’t believe that they are disconnected from the rest of the organization, but in our case, a picture spoke a thousand words," Gulas says.

According to Cross, who helped Gulas map his social network with Web-based software, the technique can help companies such as MWH Global get a sense of who is best connected in the enterprise, as well as who is most overloaded. The results can be surprising. "People are finding disconnects across functional lines, physical distance and even between people working on key projects," says Cross, who is also coauthor of The Hidden Power of Social Networks. Some of these are to be expected, but others can cause real damage to an organization.

At Mars, the SNA project uncovered a lack of good communication between the snack food division in New Jersey and the food division in Los Angeles. "We found very few bridges between the two groups, and that lack of communication was leading to duplication of efforts in some areas," says Caroline Ruzicka, who was then group research and development manager for Masterfoods USA, a division of Mars, and has since left the company. Clear evidence of this lack of communication also spurred company efforts to fix the problem. Now, employees are expected to keep in touch with certain colleagues, and their performance reviews are based in part on successful networking.

Gulas has also taken steps to correct the problems highlighted by his SNA. Motivated in part by the disconnects it saw on the SNA diagrams, MWH has a plan to reorganize around functional groups instead of regional teams. For example, the company used to have people around the globe working on messaging technologies such as Lotus Domino. But these people were often working independently, with little knowledge of what their counterparts in other countries were doing. Now, there is a single manager overseeing the domain, directing the efforts on a worldwide basis.