Dresden 2006 – scientific programme
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AKSOE: Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
AKSOE 10: Poster Session (posters are expected to be displayed the full day 8:30-18:00)
AKSOE 10.70: Poster
Wednesday, March 29, 2006, 16:00–18:00, P2
From small world to hierarchic business information networks by reorganizations - a real world study of a failure — •Markus Christen1, Georges Bongard2, Attila Pausits3, and Ruedi Stoop1 — 1Institute of Neuroinformatics, University / ETH Zürich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 8057 Zürich, Switzerland — 2Swisscom IT Services AG, 3050 Bern, Switzerland — 3Center for Telematics, Donau Universität Krems, Dr.-Karl Dorrek-Strasse 30, 3500 Krems, Austria
Business units in large enterprizes are frequently objects of reorganizations. These change the social network of the unit, expressed by the flow of information between the employees that is necessary for performing business processes. Reorganizations usually intend to increase the efficiency of the unit, measured in terms of the speed of business processes performed by the unit. We take a real-world example and investigate the change of the information-flow induced by a reorganization that transformed a small-world type into a hierarchical type network. We show that the robustness, determined in terms of how the business processes are affected by an outage of nodes in the information-flow, is a critical parameter that tends to counteract the intended gain in efficiency. The example demonstrates that reorganizations should not only focus efficiency in terms of classical business studies, but should include an analysis of the robustness of the information-flow network within a business unit as well. Otherwise, theoretically expected gain in efficiency may not be achievable in practice.