Industry Network Maps

Capitalists networks that rule the world

2011-10-26T14:51:00.000-07:00

An interesting article in the new scientist: shows who the key players are based on cross ownership data. Another example of how relationship data can provide new areas of intelligence.

I did something similar (on a much smaller scale) with the Australian media industry using cross ownership data, with similar interesting results. I'll have to think about updating that one or evening broadening it.

Poking holes in the walls of industry

2011-10-05T18:31:00.000-07:00

I had a CEO once who was a champion for knowledge sharing but at the same time appreciated the value of the conventional business unit structures, that are often referred to as "silos". He would often say "silos aren't bad...we just need to poke a few holes in the sides to get some sharing happening". In some ways the lines between the objects on our industry maps (which are usually companies) could be seen as these "holes" in action.

Holes seem to work equally well for things flowing in and out. In the network world maybe its who has their hands on the 'tap', rather than the 'tiller' that will determine whether an organisation thrives or dies?

Mining Industry Analysis

2011-09-12T17:52:00.000-07:00

We have just dome some analysis of the Australian mining industry. The first link shows how suppliers are clustered according to the services that they provide. The second is a complementary map showing how services are clustered according to the number of common suppliers.

Service Providers:

http://www.optimice.com.au/mining_services.php

Services Portfolio:
www.optimice.com.au/mining_services_portfolio.php

Visual Markets Report now available for Free Download

2011-03-29T21:58:00.000-07:00

Our Visual Markets report on the Australian IT&T marketplace is now over 12 months old, with some of the data no longer current. The novel network based techniques used for this market research however, are as fresh as ever. Those following this blog have no doubt now seen many examples of the approach. This report however provides many more case study examples, some new ways of assessing competitiveness, merger and acquisition impacts and much more.

The report is available from www.visualmarkets.com.au

Please feel free to download, read and provide feedback here.

Mapping Channels into China

2010-11-10T22:12:00.000-08:00

Met with Len Rust today. He just returned for hosting a trade mission to China. All he could say was that everyone is going there looking for business opportunities. Agencies are important in China, so if you can leverage off someone else's trusted agent then the process could be simplified significantly.

On the same topic I was in a 4 way Skype call with the Bazilian trade centre, along with some partners in Italy and China. They also have just been in China. Their challenge is to facilitate many agricultural co-operatives into a focused apporach to exporting to countries like China.

There is definitely an opportunity for Industry Mapping here. All we need is the data!Sounds like a CRM system with a visual network front end to me.

We are working on it! Have a look at this:

http://www.optimice.com.au/industrymapping.php

Industry Map of the Tourist Industry

2010-07-01T16:26:00.001-07:00

My wife and I love travelling, so we spend a lot of time surfing the Internet for deals etc.. We are often torn between using the faithful local travel agent to do this work or hitting the net ourselves looking for a better deal. What becomes obvious very quickly is how interconnected the industry is, but also how hard it is to see all of these connections. So I was intrigued recently when offered the opportunity to suggest a way of mapping the Italian Tourist Industry. Italy is one of our favourite destinations, so I could imagine that if it works out well the rewards could be significant. But the big question is, who will benefit from the increased visibility that we may be able to bring to this industry? The experience with trying to gain more business transparency in the larger capital markets has been resisted by the advisory sector who make their living out of selectively providing privately gained information. A former CEO of mine use to say "there is margin in the mystery" and therefore this increased transparency may in fact be resisted by some companies profiting from the complexity of the tourism network.

I think we'll try and do it anyway!

A new way of visualising competitiveness

2010-03-19T17:10:00.000-07:00

How would you hope to show vendor competitiveness, say in the IT outsourcing market? Perhaps you would have a bar chart showing relative revenues and market shares. This is useful, but is that enough to act on? Continuing my extracts from our Visual markets publication, here is a view of market competitiveness you will never have seen before.

Just looking at vendor contracts and joint ventures, this map plots the % of a vendor's connections that are unique to them against their total number of connections. Clearly the ideal competitiveness is indicated by multiple monopoly situations, so vendors are measured on this map against this ideal. The nodes are sized by revenues for added information.

What do you think? Any new insights? ... my recommendations? avoid the bottom left corner, not many clients or partners, none of whom are unique to you.

Oracle / Sun Merger completed - the impact?

2010-02-04T22:27:00.000-08:00

We've finally seen the completion of the mega merger of Oracle and Sun. The question on most commentator's lips is "what will the impact on the market be?" How timely! Our Visual Markets report is literally in print now! In it we have an analysis of the merger from a visual markets percpective. Here is a sneak preview:

Keep watching http://www.visualmarkets.net/ for the full report availability.

Why my injet is better than a multi-zillion dollar book printer

2010-01-20T02:00:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately our Visual Markets report is still not ready for purchase. Myself and our copy editor have learnt the hard way about images for book printing (I think he already knew .. it was mostly my problem). How is it that I can print out a report with images that look perfectly fine on my inkjet, but when it gets printed on the multi-zillion dollar book printer, they look crap! Now my graphic designer daughter just laughs and tells me I have no idea. And she's right. I absolutely have no idea why this is so .. but I have now changed all the 40+ images to higher resolutions to suite the multi-zillion dollar book printer.....maybe the printer manufacturers and the book printing folks have conned us all :)

Learning 2.0 ....end of the "Manual"

2009-11-12T17:54:00.000-08:00

I was at the Pearcey Awards last night for IT entrepreneurs. Mike Canon-Brooks, the co-founder of Atlassian was on the panel and mentioned that he was amazed at how much the "youngsters" in his company could absorb over the net ... actually Mike looks like a "youngster" to me himself :) What I took from his comments was that they had become accustomed to learning from "net manuals" meaning discussion lists, FAQs, forums etc.. I had also noticed this with my own generation Y children ... I never saw them reading a manual.

Now in my day we always started with the manual ... that gave us the basics and then we looked at the more informal sources for the real hard or tricky stuff. I'm currently working my way through the learning curve on the Confluence Wiki and its multitude of macros and plug-ins. There is no manual! Searching through the forums is a somewhat unatural act for me when I'm just trying to learn the basics. Is this just a baby boomer thing? Brought up on learning 1.0!

Visual Markets Report - counting down....

2009-11-05T23:08:00.000-08:00

Past the copy-editing phase, now on to print preparation. Will make a great Xmas present :)

Re-launch of www.optimice.com.au & Launch of Visual Markets

2009-10-08T23:41:00.001-07:00

We don’t normally do mail outs like this, but with our re-launch of the Web site being such a significant event for us, we wanted to share it with you all. It is now 3 years since we launched www.optimice.com.au and it has continuously grown in popularity over that time. We have made freely available some 40 papers, presentations and videos, something we intend to continue.

The most significant change is the incorporation of Web 2.0 functionality through our “Friends of Optimice” feature. We aim to now not only be a publishing site, but to also help our readers connect with each other. By answering a simple survey you can see how your profile fits with other readers on a dynamically changing social network map. If you want to make yourself available for contact with fellow readers simply join our “Friend of Optimice” LinkedIn group http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1807808&trk=hb_side_g

We haven’t forgotten the publishing side. We have two new white papers:

“The Tyranny of Top Down: Learning to Manage Sideways” which provides evidence through case studies as to how limiting top down management can be and offers 10 tips for managing sideways.

“Departments @ War” uses organisational network analysis to identify trust (and mistrust) networks across organisations and shows how value networks can be used to help build trust.

Finally, we are launching our new Visual Markets market research service with a major report which overviews the methods and provides a detailed analysis of the Australasian IT&T market. The report will be available for purchase in November but you can get free chapters from the pre-release here.

We look forward to meeting you in Friends of Optimice!

Visual Markets Report in Production Phase

2009-09-29T17:59:00.000-07:00

We have finally got our Visual Markets report to the production phase. Some 100+ pages of new analytical market research results of the Australasian IT&T market, providing new insights through the use a network analysis approach to market research. We hope to have it available for purchase by November, but you can get a pre-release extract from here www.visualmarkets.net

Countdown to Visual Markets Report

2009-09-23T16:23:00.000-07:00

We've engaged the copy editor and looking to launch end of October. Watch this space www.visualmarkets.net

Australian IT&T Market 2006-2009

2009-08-18T19:17:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted here for a while but I am close to competing a major report on Industry Mapping of the Australian IT&T Market Place. Watch www.visualmarkets.com.au So here's a preview....

Pharmaceuticals Network in the UK

2008-09-20T19:05:00.000-07:00

This preliminary exploration results from a discussion with Dr Emanuela Todeva from the University of Surrey, who has previously been involved in network of health clusters in the south of England. Dr Todeva provided a list of pharmaceutical firms that were active in this region. From this list a ‘market network’ was developed identifying the alliance relationships between these selected firms and other pharmaceutical firms, as identified from business reports over the past two years.

Wiki Patterns Research

2008-05-08T01:27:00.000-07:00

We have been doing some research on wiki mapping i.e. identifying social network patterns from wiki logs.

We are looking at the affiliation between editors, commentators and viewers looking for patterns that are related to performance. We are using the www.wikipatterns.com as our "playground"....watch this space...

2007-07-08T01:20:00.000-07:00

After a long break (pure laziness) I'm excited about participating in the Future of Media event on the 17/18th July http://futureexploration.net/fom07/index.html

I have recently revisited the industry maps for media in Australia since the takeover of Southern Cross Broadcasting by Macquarie Media. Essentially from an ONA perspective, Macquarie now has inherited a strong brokering postion from Southern Cross. have a look at the before and after "betweenness" maps:

Before takeover

After takeover:

2007-03-29T16:18:00.000-07:00

"Media owners, on your Mark"

This headline occurred in the Sydney Morning Herald this morning as Helen Coonan, the Federal Communications Minister has surprised the industry by bringing forward by 2 months the foreshadowed scrapping of foreign ownership restrictions. See the article at:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/business/media-owners-on-your-mark/2007/03/29/1174761661302.html

I've plotted the firms mentioned in the article on the media ownership map (you may need to click on the map to open it up for better viewing). Looks complicated, because it is! The map tends to place owners spatially close to each other when they have overlapping interests like joint ownership in a radio or TV license. So one can see that the proposed merger between Fairfax and Rural press is not radical as they share ownership of a number of licenses. Likewise with APN News & Media and Independent News and Media. Seven network is plotted with Ten network and WA Newspapers, though the article suggests merger activity is unlikely at this stage. Spatially they are marginally spearated but are still part of the large cluster of owners in the centre of the map.

Perhaps the most interesting association mentioned in the article is Macquarie's investment in Southern Cross. Macquarie media's ownership has been concentrated in rural radio stations as can be seen on the map. Southern Cross in comparision has quite diverse interests in both radio and TV and quite separate from Macquarie's current interests. As my media report shows, a network analysis places Southern Cross in a very powerful brokering position in the Australian media market. It looks like Macquarie Media has made a very astute investment compared to its peers, who have tended to look closer to home for their acquisitions.

What isn't shown on the map is the private equity firms like KKR and 452 Capital mentioned in the article. Private equity appears to be playing an increasingly important role in media ownership. I can't imagine though how much more complex this map would look, but maybe I'll give it a go some time...if I can access the data!

Putting the "R" back in CRM

2007-03-28T02:34:00.000-07:00

The "R" stands for "Relationship" right? or with most CRM systems is it really "Recording" for Customer Recording System. Once we've capture all these client details and history how much does it really help us understand client relationships? Of course data on repeat buyers may infer a good relationship, but with who? When it gets down to it companies don't have relationships, people do. How much do CRM systems help us with who in the client orgnaisation has a good relationship with whom in your organisation. I suspect very little if not at all.

Imagine if your CRM system gave you this information as well as how your clients are related to each other. Knowing whom in your client base play "key opinion leader" roles can be a trigger for your viral marketing campaigns and improve the effectiveness of your sales activities. I've had a number of discussion in the past week which suggest that the above is what companies are really needing now....an ONA exercise which explores your marketplace. And what's more, the information on building such a relationship map is likely to be available from people in your very own organisation, if we are to believe the folks from SCIP (Society for Competitive Intelligence Professionals) ...see
http://www.scip.org/pdf/f_060608_stateofart_sum.pdf

Water licenses in a drought

2007-03-01T23:42:00.000-08:00

I visited the Sydney Water Catchment authority today to meet with my good friends Serena Joyner, a keen KMer and network fan and Lea Rosser, a research colleague and now new GM of Coporate services. We got to talking about our board interlock and media ownership maps and the topic of water licenses came up as another prospective area of ownership mapping. What prompted the discussion is the recent news that Macquarie Bank are buying up water licenses from farmers. Macquarie have been astutely acquiring Australian infrastructure like toll ways, airports and are currently bidding for QANTAS.....they figure prominantly in our board interlocks and media ownership maps...now water...what next?

Brokerage and Closure

2007-02-25T21:55:00.000-08:00

I've just been reading Ron Burt's book on Brokerage and Closure (Burt, R., (2005) "Brokerage and Closure: An Introduction to Social Capital", Oxford University Press), which is a great summary of his prolific research to date. He has some interesting graphs on p143 showing the extreme profits available to firms in high brokerage positions in Industries that have a high number of structural holes. In my own research work in the Global IT sector this seemed to hold true especially in the software and Internet sub sectors, in comparison to the hardware subsector where the industry is much more closed. Made me think that a plot of companies on an industry closure vs brokerage might be a very insightful map for future investors!

Southern Cross Broadcasting takeover target

2007-02-17T18:02:00.000-08:00

I was interested to read that the current edition of the Australian Financial Reviews SmartInvestor http://www.afrsmartinvestor.com.au/ in its feature article on potential takeover targets has nominated Southern Cross Broadcasting. Recall the industry map on media owner companies (betweenness measure) had identified a single firm in a critical broking role. That was SCB!

To add some balance, it should also be noted that West Australian Newspapers was also nominated. This firm was not in a major brokering position but well positioned in one of the regional clusters....so we can't claim betweenness centrality as the only indicator of a great takeover target, but at least it could be an indicator that no-one else is looking at!

Welcome to my Industry Network Maps Blog

2007-02-09T18:35:00.000-08:00

Hi there,

I've just started up this blog to encourage conversation around what I am calling Industry Network Maps (INMs). Basically an INM is a network representation of a market place within a particular industry sector, be it manufacturing, finance, health, biotechnology, IT etc.. My interest in INMs has arisen out of my PhD research work, where I had built an INM of the global information technology sector in order to measure a firm's corporate social capital, using social network analysis techniques. The data for INMs can be "mined" from any source that you can access. The nodes usually represent firms or organisations. The links represent any association or links between firms. They may be alliances, joint ventures, sub-contracts, co-ownership and the like. This will often be dictated by the data that you can access. For my global IT INM I text mined thousands of business articles and journals over a four year period. I have done others using pre-existing data base sources.

My idea for INMs is to develop them as a market research source. My experience has shown that the INMs expose some hidden information that cannot easily be interpreted using traditional data warehouse methods. We also have the science of social network analysis to add some science to their analysis.

I have put some examples up on our web site: www.optimice.com.au

I'd be interested to hear what you think.