Briefs

Data mining is a start, but it misses the critical pieces of information that are transmitted by word of mouth. Social networking systems can foster collaboration.

By Alex Pentland -- March 31, 2004 -- Technology Review

Who are the experts within your organization? Who has the most decision-making influence? Recently, managers have started mining data from e-mail, Web pages, and other digital media for clues that will help answer such questions. That�s a start, but it misses the real action: studies of office interactions indicate that as much as 80 percent of work time is spent in spoken conversation, and that critical pieces of information are transmitted by word of mouth in a serendipitous fashion. Fortunately, the data infrastructure for mining real-world interactions is already in place. Most working professionals already carry microphones (cell phones), and many also carry PDAs with ample computational horsepower. This foundation of mobile communications and processing power will support an exciting new suite of business applications: reality mining.

The new reality-mined data allow us to cluster people on the basis of profiles generated from an aggregate of conversation, e-mail, location, and Web data. This clustering, in turn, enables us to identify collaboration or lack thereof. For instance, if two groups working on mobile commerce never talk face-to-face, that is a clear sign that they are not coordinating their efforts.

By leveraging recent advances in machine learning, we can build computational models that simulate the effects of organizational disruptions in existing social networks. We could, for example, predict the organizational effects of merging two departments. Such data-driven models help us transcend the traditional �org� chart, allowing organizations to form groups on the basis of communication behavior rather than hierarchy.

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