SAP DESIGN GUILD

Personal Networks

By Gerd Waloszek, SAP AG, Product Design Center – 09/12/2002

It's Monday morning and I'm back in the office after an exhausting weekend. I start up my computer, and as on most workdays the first thing I do is take a look at the SAP Design Guild inbox. There are five new mails in the inbox: two of them are silly junk mail, whereas the other three ask the SAP Design Guild team for advice. Two of the questions are easily answered but the third is a tough one that relates to a technical Internet Transaction Server (ITS) problem. This question gives rise to another, namely "Who do I know who can help me give an answer?" Fortunately, I remember the name of a colleague whom I worked beside in Web Application consulting a couple of years ago who might be able to help me out. I try to call him but he is not in his office, so I send him an e-mail with the question from the inbox.

Why am I telling you this story? Well, because you have just discovered that I use my "personal network" to get advice. A network like this cannot provide all the answers, however, as an hour later the colleague in question sends me an e-mail saying that he has been working in a different department for the last couple of years. He's no longer familiar with the state of the ITS and does not know the name of anybody currently working in the ITS group who could give me advice. One of my network nodes has therefore become obsolete.

Later that day, a colleague who once worked together with me in the Usability Engineering Center pops in and asks a couple of questions about the design of tables. While I can answer most of his questions, I have to refer him to a colleague for the answer to one of his more technical questions. Thus, I am part of – or a node in – his personal network, whom he has labeled the "local expert for tables." He also benefits from my personal network because I can refer him in turn to the relevant expert in my personal network.

Having introduced personal networks, I'll now take a look at them in more detail and answer the following questions: What is the definition of a personal network? What are their characteristics? What role do they play for personal and for collaborative work? I'll then conclude by outlining the opportunities and risks of personal networks from a company's point of view.

 

Social and Personal Networks – The Role of the Computer

The term "personal network" is not a new term coined during the current boom of collaboration tools. Personal or social networks have always existed (though perhaps under a different name) for the simple reason that humans are social creatures. They build relationships and form groups, they communicate and collaborate. That said, the introduction of new technologies, especially the Internet, has had a major impact on how people organize their personal networks. Time and distance have taken on new meanings. "Physical distance" has lost its significance and been replaced by a perception of "closeness" in time and virtual space. Face-to-face communication, although still important, has become less so, while computer-supported media offers previously unknown channels that inspire new communication styles.

I shall begin my tour of personal networks by defining personal and social networks. In the sections thereafter, I shall report my research findings on personal networks.

Social and Personal Networks

In the social sciences, relations between people are investigated. The system of relations between people is viewed as a "social network."

Definition of Social Network

Marsden & Campbell (1984) offer a fairly abstract definition of a social network:

A social network is a set of actors and the relations that hold them together. Actors can be individual people, or they can be aggregate units, such as departments, organizations, or families. The key is that the actors exchange resources which then connect them in a social network. Resources may include data, information, goods and services, social support, or financial support. Each kind of resource exchange is considered a social network relation, and individuals who maintain the relation are said to maintain a tie. The strength of their tie may range from weak to strong depending on the number and types of resources they exchange, the frequency of exchanges, and the intimacy of the exchanges between them.

Analyzing Social Networks

Social sciences analyze the respective social networks of people or groups in order to describe relations between people. As these are only a "theoretical constructs," they have to be reconstructed before their formal characteristics can be measured. This is typically done on the basis of interview data: people are asked about their contacts, the frequency or closeness of the contacts, the use of media, and so on. This data makes it possible to monitor and analyze the e-mail of users automatically and to create first versions of their networks.

There are two approaches to network analysis. In the sociocentric approach the network is investigated as a whole. It focuses on the pattern of connections in the entire network. In the egocentric approach, the network is centered around one person and his or her links to other people.

There are two important characteristics of networks:

1. Size: Number of nodes in a network; personal networks typically comprise ten to a few hundred nodes but may be much larger depending on the type of network (learning network, e-mail contacts, or co-workers)
2. Density: Relative amount of contacts (ties) in a network; can be expressed as the number of connections divided by the maximum possible number of connections for sociocentric networks; the density can range from 0 to 1 or 0% to 100%; for egocentric networks, the density has to be calculated differently.

For a more in-depth analysis, the role and effect of ties of different strength is taken into account. I shall return to the differential effect of tie strength below.

Definition of Personal Network

A personal network is a special type of a social network that is centered around one person, in other words, it is an egocentric network. The general and accepted definition of a personal network is

• A set of people that are preferably contacted by an individual person to get informal information or advice.

That is to say, a personal network is based on personal relationships. These may exist within a company or organization, or across organizational borders. Its main purpose is to share information and advice, not necessarily in the context of work. This definition is much more pragmatic than the definition of a social network. Personal networks are typically informal and unstructured and they include members with stronger and weaker ties.

To return to the scenario I described at the outset, another typical situation where I could make use of my personal network would be when I have been assigned to a new project in an unknown area. The first thing I would do is to contact people who know the domain and who can provide background information or give advice on how to solve problems.

Communities

Another example of a social network pattern are communities, that is to say, "unstructured groups of people loosely tied together and sharing some common interest or fortune."

While communities can be seen as unstructured and often loosely-knit sociocentric networks, personal networks are typically egocentric networks maintained by a singular person. In communities, the focus is on a common interest or fortune. Personal networks, on the other hand, serve for getting informal information or advice. It is interesting to note that the conversation within communities takes place along the personal networks that evolve within such communities (McDermott, see also the section of this article that deals with B2B relationships). Although related to the community, such conversations are not necessarily public.

Computer-Mediated Communication and Virtual Communities

As John December puts it, computer-mediated communication (CMC) is "human communication via computers." CMC has brought us a new type of community - the "virtual community," which resides in cyberspace and extends the notion of a "real" community to "cyberspace." A virtual community can be defined as "a group of people with a shared interest using information technology as a means" (Croon, 1997). Ursula Markus presents a classification of virtual communities in her article Characterizing the Virtual Community.

Effect of CMC: From Groups to Networks

The widespread use of CMC and the trend to project-focused matrix organizations has effected a shift from a "group" view to a "network" view. Freeman (1992) describes the "group" view of the past. Most people think of the world in terms of groups, boundaries and hierarchies and see themselves as belonging to a single work group in a single organization, for example. In such a "little-box society," we only deal with the people in each of our bounded groups when we are participating as members of that group. However, according to Wellman (1999), we have moved from hierarchically arranged, densely knit, bounded groups to less bounded and more sparsely knit social networks and CMC was one of the key factors in this change. In "Living Networked in a Wired World" (1999), Wellman writes:

The world is composed of networks – not groups – both computer networks and social networks. When computer networks connect people and organizations, they are the infrastructure of social networks. Just as a computer network is a set of machines connected by a set of cables (or airwaves), a social network is a set of people (or organizations or other social entities) connected by a set of socially meaningful relationships.

The implications of "living in a wired world" remain largely unknown and need further investigation. For example, Wellman (1999) maintains that computer-mediated communication (CMC), such as the Internet, news groups and video-conferencing, makes it easier for many people to be socially networked.

Computer-mediated communication also caused a phenomenon that Wellman (1999) calls "glocalization": the situation of being intensely global as a Net surfer while being firmly rooted to the area around the computer screen and keyboard. As a consequence, people build up a virtual identity in such networks, sometimes intentionally different from their actual identity (manipulated gender in chat rooms).

 

Some Data on Personal Networks

The Role of Ties

Several authors studied the role and distribution of ties in personal networks. Here are some results from the vast amount of literature on this topic.

Role of Tie Strength

People maintain ties of different strength within their personal networks. Haythornthwaite (2000) makes the following distinction:

• Strong ties: Stronger ties are maintained more frequently and are based on more types of exchanges; they provide access to more timely information. This information is more freely given since close friends are more motivated to share what they know. Thus, strong ties are more intimate or close and may be used for cooperation in addition to information exchange.
• Weak ties: Weaker ties are maintained infrequently, and are based on few types of exchanges, but they can provide access to new information that comes from more remote sources.
  Weak ties tend to be more instrumental and are used for information exchange.

There is a range of ties of different strengths in any individual's network – ranging from weaker, more instrumental ties to more intimate, personal ties. Strong ties are typically restricted to a handful of people, while intermediate and weak ties may range from tens to hundreds.

Many work ties do not need to develop to an intimate level to function successfully in a working context – intermediate ties are sufficient for maintaining useful work relationships.

Wellman and Gulia (1997) discuss the usefulness of weak ties. Even though some commentators warn about the consequences of making affiliations with strangers, net users typically trust strangers, much in contrast to real-life situations. According to the authors, the lack of status and situational cues also encourages contacts between weak ties. Weak ties are more apt than strong ties to link people with different social characteristics. Many online interactions are "intimate secondary relationships": informal, frequent and supportive community ties that nevertheless operate in a specialized domain.

Frequency of Interaction and Media Use Depending on Ties Strength

In several studies, Haythornthwaite found a relationship between the strength of ties and the frequency of interaction as well as the number of media used (the study investigated a remote-learning group). Figure 1 maps the egocentric network of a student and shows how many other students he or she interacts with, how often, and about what. The network is shown in a simplified fashion as layers of strong, intermediate and weak ties – as a so-called "network egg."

The basic message is that strong ties are frequent ties, and make use of more media than weaker and more infrequent ties.

Figure 1: "Network egg" image of a personal network showing layers of different tie strength (from Haythornthwaite, 1999)

Media Use

The results shown by Haythornthwaite have to be interpreted with some caution because technical conditions, personal preferences, and the domain also have an impact on media use in virtual networks. Here are some further results from the literature on media use:

• CMC versus face-to-face: E-mail and CMC are regarded as a useful supplement to face-to-face or phone contacts if people are mostly in the same location (Wellman, 1999). For remote groups, however, the situation may be just the opposite; that is, face-to-face contacts may be a good supplement, for example, to e-mail contacts.
• E-mail and ties: E-mail is especially useful for maintaining contact with weak ties, that is, with persons and groups with whom one does not maintain strong relationships of work, kinship, sociability, support, or information exchange. Because weak ties are more socially heterogeneous than strong ties, they connect people to diverse social milieus and provide a wider range of information (Wellman, 1999).

Network Size

The size of personal network varies depending on its respective context. For example, in a study of remote learners, Haythornthwaite (1999) found a network size of 10-15. In a study of elderly Dutch people conducted by the University of Delft, the mean network size was about 15 people and this number decreased with age. Others report similar network sizes (see above) with often only four to five strong ties. Wellman and Gulia (1997) found that an individual's network is made up of informal ties, from half a dozen intimate to hundreds of weaker ties, where the social structures are more private and dispersed. On the other hand, these authors report that Wellman's e-mail address book has about 800 entries, which is typical for loosely structured networks with many weak ties.

Hidden Activities

According to Wellman et al (1988), the activities between ties in a personal network are quite hidden from public view. In addition, the members of a network of this kind often do not know each other (apart from some included relatives). This is in line with the fact that networks such as these – at least according to our definition – mainly serve the purpose of sharing informal information or advice. Thus, the network may only exist in the mind of the person who maintains it.

The hidden activities in personal networks present a problem for companies, as a lot of relevant knowledge is not available company-wide. Therefore, companies encourage their employees to announce their skills publicly and to contribute to public knowledge bases. Often, however, employees avoid the effort involved. But even though certain knowledge may not be available publicly, employees can profit from the personal networks of others, and thus transcend and possibly expand their own networks through informal communication channels (see Huysman).

 

Awareness and Instant Messaging

Now let me turn to the ways people actively live in a personal network and look at how they maintain a perception of the members within their network.

Awareness

People belonging to a group need some "sense" or "perception" of their group mates and activities – they want to be "aware" of them. A number of tools offer awareness information, which can be either a "synchronous" indication of their mates' presence, or an "asynchronous" status information, such as the state of their work on a cooperatively edited document. Dourish and Belotti (1992) define awareness as

• An understanding of the activities of others, which provides a context of your own activity.

In literature, both the user's perception and the techniques used to achieve it are subsumed under the term "awareness." Annette Haeussler's article Supporting Groupware through Awareness offers a more thorough discussion of how awareness information can support groupware.

Instant Messaging

In the context of personal networks, awareness is often addressed from a "tool" perspective. For example, instant messaging (IM) and its role for personal networks have been investigated – sometimes with surprising results that contradict the "classical" notion of information exchange.

Nardi, Whittaker and Bradner (2000) took a look at the use of instant messaging and found some unexpected uses of it for what they call "outeraction." They define outeraction as "a set of communicative processes outside of information exchange, in which people reach out to others to enable information exchange." In other words, outeraction refers to the processes that initiate communication.

Unlike chat, IM is primarily dyadic even though people may communicate with several people in parallel. As the IM's text messages are persistent, such dialogues may last over a longer period of time. In the study, people interacted with only a small set of people (four to five) on a frequent basis. They used IM for short questions and clarifications, coordination and scheduling, arranging impromptu social meetings, and keeping in touch with friends and family. Among the "outeraction," that is, the unexpected uses, were negotiating availability (as IM is less intrusive than the phone), sustaining social connections, switching communication media, and retaining context in workplace conversations that last over longer periods of time and which are therefore interrupted more often.

If there is a high-speed company Intranet, e-mail often plays a similar role to IM. At SAP, many employees permanently monitor their e-mail inbox alerts and use e-mail for quick and informal communication.

With respect to ties, this study indicates that IM is only used within the network layer of strong ties. This observation is indirectly confirmed by the authors, who note the informal character of the IM communication and the fact that people typically interacted only with those people whom they knew well, or whom they planned to get to know well.

 

Trust

Trust is the firm reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of a person or thing. In a virtual world, trust is an even more delicate issue than in the real world because many characteristics of the person or thing that are used to establish a trusting relationship remain hidden.

Trust in Personal Networks

In personal networks, trust is especially relevant for establishing and maintaining strong ties: people need a safe environment in which they can trust people when forwarding or receiving critical information. They will only include people in the "inner layers" of their personal network who can provide useful information and advice. To put it another way, they will assign "trust levels" to people whom they include in their network. Some people may even want to include people "not to ask" or "not to inform" in their personal networks.

Trust in Business Scenarios

Trust is not only relevant in personal networks, it is an important antecedent in many business transactions – the more so if these transactions are made online.

The development of trust is the same for all types of relationships, whether romantic, manager-employee, or among peers and trading partners engaged in electronic commerce. According to Lewicki and Bunker (1996), trust develops in three stages over a period of time, from deterrence-based trust to knowledge-based trust, and finally to identification-based trust. The third stage occurs, when trading partners have taken on the needs and desires of other trading partners as their personal goals and acted in ways to consider joint gains. This is in line with the findings of Holtzblatt and Beyer, who studied personal networks in complex business scenarios (see below).

 

Personal Networks in Business Scenarios

Most work on personal networks focuses on the private aspects of such networks. However, as Karen Holtzblatt and Hugh Beyer found in a recent study on Internet commerce, personal relationships are equally important in complex business scenarios. According to the authors, trust relationships are central to complex B2B interactions. While the maintenance of such relations cannot be automated, it can be supported through good software design. For example, a desktop representation of the personal network of trust relationships could link the desktop Intranet and the external marketplace on the Web. The authors suggest that the representation should include data to support all of the participant's deals, management items and tracking information. This loose personal network is, however, only one of several models that the authors revealed in their study; its applicability depends on the business scenario at hand.

Below I present a prototype for a personal contact manager. Interestingly, this prototype already implements some of Holtzblatt's and Beyer's recommendations. For further details on the study, see also Beyond Commerce: Bringing Business Relationships and Community to the Web by Karen Holtzblatt and Hugh Beyer.

 

Supporting Personal Networks

Finally, let us consider how personal networks can be supported through computer systems. Before doing so, we have to examine why a company would be interested in investing in such support. At present, many collaboration tools focus on public activities, such as group meetings, teleconferences, or public servers, and largely neglect the private aspects of collaboration. McDermott, however, states that less than 30% of community interaction actually happens in the public domain. So there is a limit to the extent that public activities can be effective and boost collaboration within a company. Obviously, companies can make collaboration more efficient by supporting private channels for communication and collaboration, that is, by supporting personal networks. Nevertheless, companies typically have reservations with respect to these private activities for a number of reasons. One such reason is that the information flowing in these networks is not available to the public and thus mostly lost for the company. I will return to this issue below.

The Tools Question: What Might Personal Network Support Look Like?

There are already a number of tools on the market that support the different requirements of personal networks and offer access to different communication media. These include:

• Personal Information Managers (PIM), address books, contact managers, task managers (to-do lists)
• E-mail managers (e.g. Microsoft Outlook), instant messaging (IM), chat
• Phone, fax – communication hardware that has to be integrated into software systems
• Face-to-face contacts via video-conferencing systems.

Some tools already combine several aspects, such as people, dates, and tasks, but most of these tools lack integration, are restricted to one (desktop) computer (or entail tedious synchronization), or require too much work on the part of the user in the shape of data entry, recording and maintenance.

An Example: Supporting Personal Networks with ContactMap

The unsatisfactory situation with respect to software support inspired Bonnie Nardi, Steve Whittaker and their team to develop ContactMap, a contact management system that creates a personal network from the user's e-mail interactions. I have chosen to present ContactMap in this article because my thoughts about personal network support led me to a similar, albeit simpler design.

The authors conducted field interviews to find out the limitations of current tools for the linked activities of contact and conversation management. Participants in their study reported the following tasks as "expensive" and wanted to have them supported:

• Remembering the identities of the people in their social networks, particularly those who are important but are contacted infrequently
• Remembering connections between different people in the network
• Remembering or recording details about contacts, including current whereabouts and activities
• Remembering which documents had been exchanged with whom and when
• Remembering task status, such as the deadline date for a report
• Obtaining awareness information for distant contacts, such as whether they are available for a phone call, and
• Comfort using multiple communication media

The authors also found that people often construe interactions in terms of networks of people with whom they interact. ContactMap therefore explicitly visualizes the user's personal social network of contacts in a "social desktop," which helps to remember the content of conversations, track status and outstanding actions, and maintain contact information.

Unlike the majority of e-mail programs, which present a message-centric view, ContactMap's network view is people-centric. Figure 2 shows a ContactMap sample screen: the network covers most of the screen, while a panel to the left offers information about the selected person or group. The network view also shows relations between members of the personal network. Members can be assigned to groups that constitute different social categories, such as friends, family, projects, and organizational affiliations.

Figure 2: Network of contacts for Bonnie Nardi. Steve Whittaker is selected, and his contact information appears in the panel to the left. A number of Nardi's groups are visible, including ContactMap Consultants and AT&T Menlo Park (text and images from the authors; click image for larger version).

In interviews, most test users preferred ContactMap to existing solutions. Admittedly, some problems showed up in the program, but these will be addressed in subsequent versions. One such problem was managing large networks on the screen. People also wanted to use the system in a mobile environment, where screen space is even more restricted and where displaying the network may be impossible.

My Wish List

My wish list for ContactMap includes a focus-and-context display technique, such as hyperbolic trees, for easier network handling. The authors are already considering implementing a fisheye view. With respect to Haythornthwaite's findings, I would include layered views based on tie strength in ContactMap. Three levels should be sufficient to support most scenarios. As users may have problems with assigning a strength value to a tie, the system should do this automatically, based on the frequency and media use of the interactions. Further personal data might include trust levels. Finally, I would supply the system with diverse filtering capabilities, which limit the number of displayed nodes. Any attribute of a person or group could be used for filtering, but tie strength, trust level, and domain (for expert search) might be meaningful candidates for filter attributes.

 

Chances and Dangers of Personal Networks for Enterprises

The existence of personal networks indicates that people are "social" beings who need to be connected to other people. These networks typically cross institutional and organizational borders and thus mirror a person's individuality. They fulfill both a social and an instrumental role. On the one hand, they satisfy people's desire for social and intimate contacts, and on the other, they enable people to obtain information and solve problems where they might otherwise have encountered difficulties and given up.

Surely nobody can doubt the "social" benefits offered by personal networks. In addition, the knowledge transfer and assistance provided by personal networks makes work processes run much more smoothly: People who need information or assistance can call other people inside or outside the company for help and are able to continue their work or possibly work more efficiently as a result.

Nevertheless, the problem remains that the knowledge transferred or skills offered within personal networks is to some extent lost for the company. Employees who might profit from this knowledge cannot use it because it is not publicly available. What's more, when employees leave a company, their knowledge or skills are often not transferred to colleagues.

My introductory scenario demonstrates this problem. I had difficulty finding an expert on the ITS – my personal network did not include one. Wouldn't it be nice if SAPNet offered a list of experts for different domains to whom I could address my queries?

Yet the question of whether to make a personal network of local experts publicly available should be considered with care and caution. Everyone has their own private set of local experts to contact when they have certain questions. These personal relationships have been nurtured over time and are often backed up by a very special "fit" between the two people concerned. Indeed, it is for this very reason that different people have different local experts, so there is no point in making the names and skills public. In addition, these experts may be willing to give up some of their time for a couple of people but not for thousands of colleagues in need of advice.

So the company is left with the following dilemma: on the one hand, it should encourage and support personal networks, as they make for smoother work processes while giving people the private space they need. On the other hand, it has to encourage and motivate people to make their knowledge and skills publicly available without destroying personal relations or overloading people with support questions. Software tools can help in both cases by supporting and protecting the privacy of personal networks as well as by making it easy and rewarding for people to make their knowledge and skills available. Last, but not least, however, companies will have to nurture a climate in which knowledge sharing becomes a win-win situation both for the company and its employees. For an in-depth look at this issue, see Knowledge Sharing in Practice by Marleen Huysman.

Personal networks not only make the daily work in offices run smoothly. As Holtzblatt and Beyer point out, personal trust relationships, which in essence form a personal network, are also important in complex B2B scenarios – they are a key contributor to sales and profit and therefore to the success of the company as a whole.

 

Conclusion

All in all, the evidence above suggests that companies should invest effort in supporting personal networks with appropriate software and integrated media solutions. Such a solution might share many of the characteristics of ContactMap, which provides a visual representation of personal networks and tries to support the most exacting tasks in contact and relationship management. It would most likely form part of an enterprise portal solution that also connects the person using it to the company Intranet and - transcending the company boundaries – to the World Wide Web. Such efforts are reflected in SAP's newest products, like the mySAP Enterprise Portal and the Employee Productivity Suite, which includes the concept of ERM and B2E (Enterprise Relationship Management and Business to Employee).

To return to my introductory scenario, I am still muddling through with the maintenance of my personal network. Sometimes I rely on SAP's company e-mail system and Intranet, sometimes on personal notes, documents stored on my computer, and such like, and at other times I simply rely on my memory. Many others doubtlessly have a similar approach , and perhaps that's the reason why most personal networks are loosely structured.

 

References

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• December, J. Website on Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) – Frequently Asked Questions (www.december.com/cmc/info/faq.html)
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• Lewicki, R. J.& Bunker, B. B. (1996). Developing and Maintaining Trust in Work Relationships. In: Kramer, R. M., & Tyler, T. R., Trust in Organizations: Frontiers of Theory and Research. London, UK: Sage Publications.
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• Nardi, B. A., Whittaker, S. & Bradner, E. (2000). Interaction and outeraction: Instant messaging in action. Proc of the CSCW. (PDF no longer available, www.research.att.com/~stevew/outeraction_cscw2000.pdf)
• Nardi, B. A., Whittaker, S., Isaacs, E., Creech, M., Johnson, J. & Hainsworth, J. (2002). Integrating communication and information through ContactMap. Communications of the ACM, 45, 89–95. (older PDF version: www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/I-M/is/people/stafpage/whittake/CACM02.pdf)
• Wellman, B. (1999). Living networked in a wired world. Department of Sociology, University of Toronto. (www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/livingnetworked/ieee1%5B1%5D.4b.PDF)
• Wellman, B. & Gulia, M. (1997). Net surfers don't ride alone: Virtual communities as communities. Department of Sociology and Center for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto. (www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/netsurfers/netsurfers.pdf)

 

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