PERF RMANCE 04 - The Performance Portal - Ernst & Young

Internet banking case study:
increasing organizational
performance by analyzing
knowledge flow
Sandy Pentland, a professor at the MIT
Media Lab, has been developing jointly
with his graduate students a series of
“sociometric badges.” The sociometric
badges combine a radio sensor to measure
the relative locations of the wearer, an
infrared sensor that analyzes if people
wearing the badges are facing each other,
an accelerometer that measures how
excited the people wearing the badges are
and a microphone that measures the pitch
of the voice of the wearer, as a further
indicator of the level of excitement. Using
these badges, Sandy and his students have
been able to predict if people were paying
attention to the speaker in meetings, and
in speed-dating situations, whether the two
people would end up exchanging phone
numbers. Together with Sandy and his
students, we used these social badges to
identify social interaction networks on a
much more granular and interpersonal
level than by just mining email, blogs and
online forums.
In particular, we analyzed the interaction of
20 employees at a German bank, as well as
the interaction among nurses in a Boston
area teaching hospital. In the German bank,
20 members of the marketing department
wore the badges for the duration of one
month. Collecting the interaction data from
the badges and comparing it with the social
network constructed from emails already
exchanged, showed us that different people
were central to the email and the
face-to-face interaction networks (see
Figure 2). For example, the department
head was very central in the face-toface
social network; obviously he was a
“floor-walker,” someone who was talking
personally and continuously with the
members of his group. On the other
hand, the department secretary was quite
peripheral in the face-to-face network but
very central to the email network.
Figure 2. Combined interaction network
(email and sociometric badges) among
employees in bank department. Note the
automatic identification of hidden leaders
by their social network position, and
the split of the department into a “high
performing” and a “creativity” group.