A company grows, it shrinks, people come and go. Justin Matejka, a research scientist at Autodesk, visualized the changes for where he works.
The OrgOrgChart (Organic Organization Chart) project looks at the evolution of a company’s structure over time. A snapshot of the Autodesk organizational hierarchy was taken each day between May 2007 and June 2011, a span of 1498 days.
Each day the entire hierarchy of the company is constructed as a tree with each employee represented by a circle, and a line connecting each employee with his or her manager. Larger circles represent managers with more employees working under them. The tree is then laid out using a force-directed layout algorithm.
Each second in the animation is about one week of activity, and acquisitions are most obvious when big clumps of people join the company. The long-term changes are a little harder to see, because the branches in the network fade into the background. Recomputing the layout each week might be good for the next round.
[Thanks, Justin]
Pretty cool. I wish it went further back; when I worked there in the ’90s, it seemed that re-organizations were the company’s favorite sport. Curious if it’s changed qualitatively since then.
I’ve placed the Autodesk share price and the NASDAQ composite index under the chart and there is little to indicate that the constant restructuring has had any impact on the share price. It’d be interesting have see have the underlying data for staff movements and share price movements and see which is the lead indicator. http://hudgeon.com/2012/12/19/does-restructuring-your-company-add-value/
Amazing! Definitely cool, but how can Autodesk executives use this network viz to understand key dynamics of company growth. This feels like the first step toward a useful decision support tool. Need to add time shuffle and zoom/filter interactive controls. Need to add Tableau/QlikView on a second monitor linked to the viz, so for a specific time slice other company variables could be compared. Super start! I never would have imagined the complexity visualized over just 4 years of company history.