AWSM: Allocation of work flows utilizing social network metrics
Authors: Bajaj, Akhilesh; Russell, Robert
Journal: Decision Support Systems (2010)
DOI: 10.1016/i.dss.2010.07.014
The primary contribution of this work is a methodology that serves as a decision support tool to create teams of human actors within an organization to perform work flows, based on optimizing social network (SN) measures of choice, such as group or team cohesiveness. Past literature shows that the constituent activities of the work flows will be performed with greater efficiency and/or effectiveness if the workgroup of actors is optimized along an SN measure such as group cohesiveness. The major contribution here is the creation and implementation of a formal generalized methodology we call AWSM (Allocation of Work flows with Social Network Metrics) that incorporates ideas from two diverse fields: social network theory and work flow modeling, and allows optimization of work groups along any SN metric. In order to implement this model we present newly created algorithms to structure and represent the problem so that standard integer programming solvers can be utilized to solve it. We also present a performance analysis of the AWSM methodology and empirically test its feasibility for solving real world sized problems.