A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Social PLM, Graphs and Organizational Overlap

Social PLM, Graphs and Organizational Overlap
Oleg
Oleg
24 July, 2013 | 2 min for reading

Social tools are capturing lots of noise and making real impact these days. After initial hype of MySpace and early days of Facebook, social networks is getting down to real business, profit and smart technology. LinkedIn engineering publication earlier today speaks about some smart engineering work done by LinkedIn engineers analyzing data about people connections. Navigate to the following link to read Organizational Overlap on Social Networks and its Applications. I found some facts from this article quite interesting. One of them related to the ability of connection identification.

A basic problem in network analysis is predicting links for partially observed networks, that is, given a snapshot of connections at time t, can we predict links at time t+1. On any online social network, two members might know each other, but may not have established a connection on the site. Link prediction and recommendations help address this problem and create a more complete social graph to improve user involvement.

Another interesting use is identification of communities.

The organizational overlap model also works well for detecting communities within an organization. It is usually hard to evaluate the quality of communities because of a lack of ground truth. We used an indirect method to evaluate the quality: intuitively, the speed of information propagation should be faster within a community, so we measured the quality of detected communities by the speed of information propagation within it.

The problem of identification of communities can be interesting in the context of introducing of social network in product development organization and actually in any enterprise organization. The communication patterns in existing organization is mostly driven by emails these days. Social networks are just establishing themselves and engineering is probably not the first place where they start. However, the ability to capture communication relationships between engineers can help to identify knowledge gaps and efficiency problems.

What is my conclusion? The combination of data networks and communication network can bring lots of new opportunities in product development. At the time, companies are scratching their heads trying to understand where next cost saving will come from, the answers are probably deep in the roots of social product networks. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
10 October, 2017

IoT is everywhere these days. You may think, there is no way to escape from the transformation and success IoT...

31 October, 2010

I postponed my monthly writing this month to give few words PTC Creo launch this week. CAD community already started...

28 July, 2010

iPad sales are skyrocketing. I read “Global CIO: Top 10 Reasons Steve Jobs & Apple Are The Future Of IT”....

29 September, 2011

PLM is a lot of lifecycle. It is a very important characteristic of PLM to support product access the multiple...

20 August, 2020

I’m continuing to explore Siemens and SAP partnership. In my earlier articles, I touched some business aspects of partnerships. You...

6 September, 2017

AI and Machine learning buzz is going through the roof. The number of new companies in the this categoryhas grown...

15 August, 2014

Product Data Management (PDM) isn’t a new domain. The first PDM systems were invented 20-30 years ago with a simple...

19 September, 2012

I was long time I didn’t write anything about SharePoint. I’ve been tracking SharePoint for the last 5-7 years very...

28 August, 2009

I was reading the following article “Why Excel is not Enterprise BI Solution Yet. What I liked is the way...

Blogroll

To the top