APPLICATIONS OF

SNA
ORGANIZATIONAL ISSUES

■ Organizational Behavior is the study and application of knowledge

about how people, individuals, and groups act within an organization.
■ In any organization, cooperation and information sharing among the
workers is very important for the success of an organization.
■ SNA can also be used to identify the key or central persons of an
organization which also helps to understand important to go people in
an organization
■ These findings can be used to take corrective measures
ORGANISATIONAL ISSUES- TEAM
FORMATION
■ For the success of any project, right team formation is a very crucial issue
which requires careful analysis of the available human resources of an
organization.
■ In larger organizations, it is obvious that two individuals work on similar
projects without realizing it. It is possible to generate the teams of individuals
having similar skills and interest using SNA.
■ The teams cohesiveness is also key factor which affects the projects success.
In this context, various measures including centrality and closeness can be
obtained from the social network of team members to study the networks
cohesiveness.
■ This knowledge aids the project leaders to build strategy to take proper
actions to develop multi-agency team. Multi-disciplinary projects benefit from
appropriate multi-agency team in terms of its better performance and results
ORG. ISSUES- INFORMATION
SHARING
■ The SNA techniques have also been employed to understand the flow
of knowledge or information.

■ The exchange of information and ideas makes favorable conditions for

innovation and introduction of new ways of working. Hence, the
information sharing has become a important factor for the success of
the project.

■ SNA techniques are used to discover the sources of information, the

structure of information sharing, and ways to access available
knowledge. The above analysis identifies the right people in any
project according to their area of expertise.
ORG. ISSUES- BOTTLENECKS

■ Team may not function as expected even by having the right team
and right information resources.

■ The bottlenecks such as un-uniform distribution of workload and

resources may have happened inadvertently but it affects the
decision making and information sharing.

■ Social network analysis can identify such bottlenecks in a team. The

team can address these issues and plan ways to improve the
efficiency and unlock the flow of resources in the network.
ORG. ISSUES- HIDDEN BARRIERS
■ Various hidden barriers to knowledge or resource sharing and co-operation
affect the performance of multi-agency system.
■ Hidden barriers arise because of different race, religion, cast, age, gender,
professional or educational background, department etc. Other factors
affecting co-operation may be unavailability of time, opportunity, physical
presence to have relationship with other people having different corporate
policies and cultures.
■ The interactions or bonds amongst similar people are more effective than
dissimilar people. Social network analysis has been also used as a tool to
identify such hidden barriers, to understand effect of these hidden
barriers, and help people to plan for simple, targeted interventions.
■ In this case, interactions amongst employees are modeled as a social
network and various classification algorithms with cohesion measure are
used to find closely related groups to identify hidden barriers
RECOMMENDATION & E-
COMMERCE
■ One of the important requirements of the recommendation systems is
to discover the users interaction patterns by searching users social
network and similar likes and dislikes.
■ SNA can be used to discover relationships of users to aid in making
recommendations.
■ These websites acts as recommender agents to learn customers,
obtain their preference and provide items of their interest. Once a
customer benefits from the recommendation services provided by a
particular website then the customers trust factor increases and
switching to other competing websites decreases over time
RECOMMENDATION & E-
COMMERCE
■ The performance of recommender systems has been evaluated by
applying SNA techniques to measure the effectiveness of the system
and to suggest the improvements required in the system. To facilitate
this, the percentage of predictions given by system can be compared
against that inferred from SNA of customers network
■ A node with high vertex similarity with existing one is presented with
the items of preference of existing customer.
■ Customers have a tendency to see and follow what other influential
customers buy. Influential customers can be identified by using
centrality measures such as betweenness centrality, closeness
centrality and eigen vector centrality etc. SNA in this direction may
require research attention.
COVERT NETWORKS

■ The covert networks are hidden, the actors of such network does not
disclose their information to the external world.
■ The terrorist and criminal networks are good examples of such networks.
Generally, the information about actors, relationship among them and
involvement in any external event is not easily available in terrorist
networks.
■ Intelligence analysis normally focused on the identification of network
vulnerabilities within the different types and forms of criminal networks
■ SNA has been used to understand the communication and structure of
terrorist cells. SNA is applied on terrorism database for predicting node
and link, discovering interesting patterns and actors involved in an
event. SNA discovers who is central within organizations, which
individuals removal would most effectively disrupt the network, what
roles individuals are playing, and which relationships are vital to monitor.
COVERT NETWORKS- CONTINUED

■ Terrorist organizations have special structures on recruitment,

evolution, and ideas diffusion in network. SNA tools has been used to
identify these organization structures and provide critical information
for terrorist detection and terrorism prediction
■ The Valdis Krebs has used social network analysis to map the terrorist
network that attacked on 9/11. In spite of unavailability of complete
and proper knowledge of all actors and connections in between them,
his analysis has disclosed network which is almost near to real
network.
■ SNA techniques applied to terrorists network varies from basic
measures to complex graph algorithms and data mining techniques.
The basic measures includes betweenness and degree centrality
measures, cohesion factors, closeness
WEB APPLICATION

■ Web is being used by different community for various purposes such

academic improvement, knowledge sharing, interest sharing,
communication and profiling, research, business
■ SNA has been used to solve various security problems in computer
communication system. It has been successfully employed to detect
insider threats and security violation of email systems.
■ By analyzing the navigation and usage patterns of web, better
improvements in web algorithms for gathering, searching and
discovering information can be achieved
■ By observing and analyzing current web usages, the evolution of web
structure can be predicted.
WEB APPLICATION CONTINUED

■ SNA is also employed to predict the movie success and academy

awards from IMDB network
■ SNA is also used in search engines such as google to enhance
keyword search quality
■ Google uses PageRank as a measure of popularity.
■ Given a keyword query, matching documents are ordered by this
score. Since this popularity score is precomputed independent of the
query
COMMUNITY WELFARE

■ SNA is used to analyze different types of relations such as

communication patterns, physical contacts, sexual relationship etc.
The SNA may reveal the patterns of human contact which may lead to
spread of disease such as HIV in population. Considerable research
has been done to analyze the spread of disease
■ examine and observe farm animal network to identify patterns of
disease spread from one animal to another
■ Mass surveillance is one of the modern practices undertaken by some
organizations and governments to monitor the behavior of suspected
people of population. This is done with the purpose of protecting
people from criminals, terrorists or political subversives to maintain
social control
 COLLABORATION NETWORKS
■ Collaboration network consists groups of persons working together to
perform particular activity.
■ The co-authorship network is analyzed by various researchers to study
dynamics in patterns of interactions between educational entities or
communities. Further, these types of networks are analyzed to
understand the influence of individual researchers
■ SNA also identifies the most prominent actors in particular subject area
and reveals their ego networks.
■ The observations and results of time series and location based analysis
captures the nature and characteristics of research subject over time and
location.
■ This helps to identify the scope of research discipline at particular
location so that further new inventions in same can be promoted at
respective region and using skills of subject experts
COLLABORATION NETWORKS-
CONTD.
■ way to improve the interdisciplinary research is by identifying such current
interactions and engaging involved institutions and researchers for future
research
■ scope of research subject and persons subject interest may vary over time,
these networks has been viewed as a dynamic social networks
■ The required datasets for co-authorship network analysis is mostly extracted
from sources including scientific journals, bibliographic records and digital
libraries.
■ The cohesion is used to identify the subgroups within network with respect to
each research subject
■ Node centrality measure in this context represents extend of similar subject
skills. This will help to identify group of persons to engage in particular research
knowing few expertise in that area. The identified hub in sub-network can
represent the key researcher in that sub-network
■ Movie actor network is analyzed to study the interaction amongst themselves,
to discover closely related actors.
CO-CITATION NETWORKS
■ Co-citation analysis helps to understand the status and structure of
scientific research. Basic two approaches of co-citation are author
cocitation and document co-citation
■ Co-citation network can be viewed as a bipartite graph showing
linkage between two different groups of documents.
■ SNA reveals the research network consisting of different institutions
linked to each other informally by having indicators to each others
documents/papers which can be used to get group of institutes having
similar ongoing research. This may help to promote further research
in respective area in those institutions.
■ SNA has been also studied as an approach to understand journals
importance or prestige.