MITeams : quick organizational mapping by combining email and survey data

Abstract

Organizational maps can help teams and organizations improve how they manage their human and social capital. Yet, keeping track of the relationships in an organization is a complex, labor-intensive, and time-consuming task. Here I present MITeams: an automated visualization tool for quick organizational mapping. MITeams uses email metadata to map the pattern of communications within an team and combines this information with demographic and psychological variables collected from externally validated surveys included in MITeams. These capacities allow MITeams to create maps of teams and organizations, combining communication and psychological variables, in a matter of hours. I present several use cases of MITeams with the user experience of a research team. User study is conducted with another research team to validate MITeams's the ability in mapping the communication pattern and assisting members learn team knowledge. Our results show that MITeams can be used to quickly map organizations, and help their members get a deeper understanding about team communication network and dynamics in a short time.