An organization topographic map for visualizing business hierarchical relationships

Abstract

Visualization of the actual conditions of an organization is a very challenging issue. We propose a new system called a Business Microscope that senses the activities of people in an organization and provides visual feedback to users. We use name-tag shaped sensor nodes to measure face-to-face interaction between employees. The massive amount of data collected by the sensor-network terminal are signal-processed by the server and displayed as an organization's topographic map that displays the frequencies of organizational activities. To depict the organization's topographic map, our system creates a novel relation tree using the interaction data from all pairs of members. In this kind of map, some groups in the organization hierarchically form islands. Members in those islands who have relationships with many others form mountains that are plotted with contours. We can comprehend the actual conditions of organizations from our topographic map. We tested our technique in several experiments to evaluate this system.