Endless Knots

What disease is a cousin of yours?

Fascinating article in today's NY Times, "Redefining disease, genes and all," with a chart called "Mapping the human diseaseome" that looks a lot like OrgScope, which I've posted about here, here, and here (search "OrgScope" on right for full listing).

Gene research is causing medicine to reclassify. Turns out that seemingly unrelated diseases share some number of genes. Definitely worth reading and definitely worth playing with the map in which Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, author of Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else, has had a hand. The map assigns a color to each disease and a size to its "wafer," indicating how many genes that disease contains. Then it draws lines to other diseases that share genes with it. Implications are far-reaching and possibly even paradigm changing for how we treat disease. From the article:

Duchenne muscular dystrophy may not seem to have much in common with heart attacks. One is a rare inherited disease that primarily strikes boys. The other is a common cause of death in both men and women. To Atul J. Butte, they are surprisingly similar.

Dr. Butte, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford, is among a growing band of researchers trying to redefine how diseases are classified — by looking not at their symptoms or physiological measurements, but at their genetic underpinnings. It turns out that a similar set of genes is active in boys with Duchenne and adults who have heart attacks.

Geek Doctor on OrgScope

Pleased to report that John Halamka over at GeekDoctor posts today about our OrgScope in his Cool Technology of the Week series:

Understanding the six degrees of separation of healthcare in Eastern Massachusetts can be challenging with our numerous providers, private payers, public payers, and academic affiliations...

I found this hyperbolic viewer [OrgScope] much easier than an org chart for navigating a large number of complex relationships and look forward to the potential uses of this technology for visualizing our increasing connectedness in healthcare...

Over the past few months here at NetAge, we've taken a stab at mapping the relationships among the complex players in the Boston Healthcare network. Spaghetti, for sure, but since all of us here in Boston must somehow navigate that bowl of pasta, we're hopeful that these initial maps will contribute to making it easier for those working in healthcare here and for those of us consuming it. Thanks, Geek Doctor.

If you click through, you can play with the maps. This is but one picture. You can move it around, putting different institutions at the center, turn links on and off, and run analyses in a variety of ways. There's also an inside look at the organization chart of a fictitious large enterprise and Boston-Area Healthcare Network, a presentation that explains what we're up to with this stuff. Have fun with it and let me know what you think.

It's so complex

Rare confluence of the complexity gods this week in Boston as The New England Complex Systems Institute sponsors the annual International Conference on Complex Systems 2007. Aesthetics, biology, social systems, engineering, biology, and, of course, networks all get their due over the next week. Catch us on Network Day, Friday, Nov 2, which begins with Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus receiving the Herbert Simon Award. Simon wrote the seminal article, The Architecture of Complexity, in 1962.

Reply to this post and/or email me if you're attending: jessica dot lipnack at netage.

The whole organization in a stadium

Is this scene familiar? You're new to an organization--as employee, partner, supplier, board member, chief executive, whatever, you're new. And you want to understand how things work. So the person you're talking to whips out an org chart, talks about the boxes, then picks up a pen and starts crossing boxes out, drawing  dotted lines, adding other boxes that are actually off the chart.

We wondered what would happen if you could "see" the whole organization at once: who works for whom, who reports "dotted-line," who belongs to what team, how the workflow itself progresses.

So we've written The Stadium Parable, wherein you, mythical CEO, invite your whole organization to a stadium to conduct an exercise whereby everyone draws all the lines of work connections (to see in web pages, click here). Possible? We think so.

"(We) will reduce number of layers from ... 11 to about 7"

The new CEO at BP is shaking things up, or perhaps better said, taking things out. CNNMoney.com quotes Tony Hayward in BP Shares sinks as CE0 warns on results:  "'There is massive duplication and lack of clarity of who does what,'" the [Financial Times] quoted Hayward as saying. "'We will reduce the number of organization units. (We) will reduce the number of layers from the workers up to the CEO from 11 to about seven.'"

Is that the right number, Mr. Hayward?  How do you know what the right number is? Using OrgScope, we found 11 levels at one of the energy giant's competitors--and its shares are not sinking.

How do you determine the right number of levels in an organization the size of BP, with in the neighborhood of 100K employees and perhaps 10x that number more in contractors? What number allows the chief executive and senior leaders to "spot weaknesses and areas for improvement," as one energy executive said to us.

The deeper question here is not about a target number of levels but about whether the structure optimizes strategy.

Visualizing the organization with OrgScope

Michael Sampson has a good description of OrgScope, the technology we've developed at NetAge for visualizing the many networks inside and outside organizations.

Thanks, Michael, for the visibility. Michael is a collaboration consultant based in Christchurch, NZ, who hosted  when I spoke to the New Zealand Knowledge Management Network (there's that word again) in March '07.

Play with OrgScope.