SNA and SCA (Social Connection Analysis)
Tech | No comments | March 03rd, 2009
I had an interesting exchange today on Twitter with Valdis Krebs, an acclaimed expert in the field of Social Network Analysis (SNA). I have known about SNA for a while but have never studied it in depth. As I am developing the product offering for Decision 3D, I am coming to the conclusion that SNA will inevitably need to be part of that offering, but I still don’t think that SNA is the core of Decision Due Diligence.
In my mind Decision Due Diligence has more of a personal feel than you get from an overall network analysis. The process specifically accounts for the emotions and behaviors of the players, or nodes in SNA jargon, along with the actual mechanics involved in passing information between nodes. So the importance of links, from a Decision Due Diligence perspective, is to a large degree self-contained. On the other hand the importance of links in SNA is a function of where the link exists with respect to other links.
Upon reflection, I think the two approaches are perfectly complementary. If you can understand the dynamics of a specific link as well as how that link fits into the larger system, you have a powerful tool for understanding information flow within an organization.
As I was working on this post, the term Social Connection Analysis (SCA) jumped into my head, and I think that is the right label for the concept I am addressing above, and the thing I was trying to address with @valdiskrebs in the twitter exchange you see to the right. Where the core of SNA is understanding the aggregate of all the connections in a network, the core of SCA is understanding the specifics of any one connection within the network.