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Organizational Analytics Disciplines

Organizational analytics doesn't come from a single field -- it sits at the crossroads of five powerful disciplines, each contributing a different lens for understanding the hidden dynamics inside organizations. This MicroSim helps you see how those disciplines connect.

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How to Use

  1. Hover over any spoke node to see a description of that discipline and how it contributes to organizational analytics.
  2. Click a spoke node to highlight its connection to the hub and dim the others -- the info panel shows a concrete example of the discipline in action.
  3. Click the background to reset the view.

The Five Disciplines

Network Science provides the theoretical foundation for understanding how connections between people create emergent properties like influence and resilience.

Graph Theory gives us the mathematical structures (nodes and edges) and algorithms (centrality, community detection, pathfinding) that make organizational networks computable.

Natural Language Processing unlocks the meaning hidden in text -- emails, Slack messages, performance reviews -- turning unstructured communication into structured insights.

Machine Learning detects patterns across large organizational datasets, powering predictions about flight risk, skill gaps, and team performance.

Business Process Mining reveals how work actually flows through an organization by analyzing event logs, exposing the gap between documented procedures and reality.

Lesson Plan

Learning Objective

Students will classify the contributing disciplines that form organizational analytics.

Warm-Up (5 minutes)

Ask students: "If you wanted to truly understand how your organization works -- not the org chart version, but the real version -- what kinds of tools or skills would you need?" Collect answers on the board and group them.

Activity (15 minutes)

  1. Have students explore the MicroSim, clicking each discipline node.
  2. For each discipline, students write one sentence explaining how it contributes to organizational analytics in their own words.
  3. Students compare the five disciplines to the categories they brainstormed in the warm-up.

Discussion (10 minutes)

  • Which discipline surprised you the most? Why?
  • Can you think of a real organizational question that would require two or more of these disciplines working together?
  • If you had to pick just one discipline to start with, which would give you the most insight into your organization?

Assessment

Students sketch their own hub-and-spoke diagram with "Organizational Analytics" at the center and add one real-world scenario for each discipline that they have not seen in the MicroSim.

References

  • Barabasi, A.-L. (2016). Network Science. Cambridge University Press.
  • van der Aalst, W. (2016). Process Mining: Data Science in Action. Springer.
  • Borgatti, S. P., Everett, M. G., & Johnson, J. C. (2018). Analyzing Social Networks. SAGE Publications.