Applying organizational network analysis techniques to study information use in a public health agency.

We are applying organizational network analysis to explore information use in a public health department. The technique is grounded in social science theory, and employs calculations derived from graph theory to generate statistical and graphical models from relational data matrices. For this pilot we will develop network models to characterize how information use in routine work contributes to the agency's performance goals. This is the first step in ongoing work that will extend network analysis with computational methods, to predict the potential effects that improving information use has on the agency's performance.