Visual Enterprise Network Analytics

Collaboration is the way work gets done in organisations. Therefore networks of different types, functions and compositions have become an inevitable precondition of organisational performance in the modern corporate world. However, these networks are not static, but changing over time. Organisational analysts such as consultants, enterprise analysts, and strategic and human resource managers are seeking for appropriate tools and methods supporting the information discovery processes of these dynamic networks and the underlying data. In particular, interactive visual and analytic methods to explore the dynamic properties of underlying structures are required to provide empirically grounded decision support for organisational analysts. Aim To meet these demands the proposed project “Visual Enterprise Network Analytics” (VIENA) takes on the method of Dynamic Network Analysis (DNA) whose potential for applied use in enterprises is well known. To unlock this potential also to non-domain experts two associated fields of research are leveraged: namely Visual Analytics and Usability Engineering. A constant focus on usability will assure the development of a user-centred software prototype and an intuitive GUI, while the Visual Analytics components will allow the radically new interactive exploration of dynamic network data sets and the retrieval of relevant information. VIENA facilitates the (semi-)automatic analysis of teams and organisations over different periods of time. The heterogeneous dynamical data and information sets which get structured, semantically annotated, and visualised by DNA methods get additionally processed using innovative Visual Analytics methods. The aimed integration of selected research prototypes into the industria partner’s business software environment will allow real-user testing and assessments from the application and utility point of view.