Building a Networked Organization: Restructuring the it Department at MWH (B)

Abstract

In this first in a series of cases on organizational network analysis (ONA), Vic Gulas, the new head of IT at the engineering consulting firm MWH Consulting, is charged with turning a geographically organized department into one organized by function. He knows that the success of the reorganization will depend on effective collaboration, but he cannot get a sense of what collaborative relationships do and do not exist by looking at a formal organizational chart. Instead, Gulas uses ONA, a method for mapping relationships among people in a group. In the ONA results, Gulas sees a group still fragmented by geography and constrained by hierarchy and other gaps in connectivity. The B case presents the network-building steps Gulas took on the basis of the ONA results and the results of a follow-up ONA Gulas conducted two years after the initial analysis. This second ONA revealed a network that was stronger and more appropriately connected in various ways.