Excerpts from an excellent blog from ValueNetworks.com colleague and customer, Steve Waddell of Networking Action
We can easily be overwhelmed by the complexity of large networks where there are many different organizations and people involved. Clearly “seeing” relationships between organizations, people, and key concepts is important for successful network strategies.
To vastly enhance and speed understanding of these relationships, I’ve worked with various forms of “mapping”. Network maps are diagrams of lines or arrows (representing connections) and nodes (representing individuals, organizations, ideas) that can visually communicate tremendous amounts of information much more easily than volumes of text. Here are some approaches I’ve found useful:
Web crawls
This approach maps and analyzes relationships between URLs. This gives a picture of how organizations and issues are connected virtually that is increasingly important in any strategy. Since URLs are usually associated with organizations, crawls quickly identify organizations working in a particular issue system. The crawls maps links on one web-site to another webs-site.
Example: Working with a tool developed at the University of Amsterdam, we did crawls to identify networks in the global finance system for the Global Finance Initiative in order to identify key organizations and people to develop a change strategy. Map 1 is of NGOs engaged in the global finance debate; it suggests that surprisingly they do not have well defined relationships with perhaps the most influential players in global finance, including the Bank for International Settlements and the Financial Stability Board.
Map 1: Web Crawl
Social/Organizational/Inter-Organizational network analysis (SNA/ONA/IONA)
This is classic social network analysis applied specifically to understanding relationships within and between organizations. The existence and relative importance of relationship, connections or communication flows between individuals and organizations is described by these approaches.
Example: When the Global Reporting Initiative considered its strategy for developing a South African network, we used social network analysis. This produced Map 2, which shows distinct groups of organizations. This emphasizes the importance of weaving the groups together, and the value of working with organizations that are well-connected in the groups. Another product was a guide on how to initiate a network.
Map 2: Inter-Organizational Social Network Analysis
(Click on map to enlarge view.)
Value Network Analysis (VNA)
Key roles and value outputs in an issue system are defined through VNA, helping to shift stakeholder mindset toward a network perspective beyond their usual organizational or institutional focus. This approach has been developed by Verna Allee.
Example: When the European Commission wanted to understand how to enhance the process of innovation, we applied VNA using the ValueNetworks.com application to produce a report with four archetypes (models) for moving from an academic idea to a product for a consumer, with important policy implications. Verna emphasizes the importance of including both contracted tangible exchanges such as money, and intangible ones such as information. This is illustrated in Map 3
Map 3: VNA map of innovation
(Dashed lines are intangibles, solid lines are tangibles.)
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