E-mail network analysis as a technology management tool

For technology and innovation management, it is critical to identify communities and deploy informal leaders. In our recent studies we demonstrated our method was effective to identify informal technological communities and potential leaders from email data within an organization and with chronological data, a formal organization was evaluated with informal communities before and after major organizational changes. In this paper we apply our method to evaluate the formal technology groups through a case study in a global manufacturing company. We collect two sets of one-month email log, construct an email network, identify communities in the email network by performing a topological clustering of networks, calculate degree centrality, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, and pagerank centrality to identify leaders, and compare them against formal technological communities of practice activities. Our method helps management systematically view its organization as a whole by using email network analysis. At the same time, the analysis can be used to evaluate communication of interactions among the members. It also helps propose effective CoP and candidates of leaders acting as a hub of information channel of the communication network.