Distributed face-to-face communication in bottom-up driven technology management-a model for optimizing communication topologies

Understanding the communication process in software development organizations has been recognized as the key element to improve the development performance. The paper analyses how different communication topologies-who talks directly to whom and who is informed only via third persons-result in different communication costs and different communication efficiencies. The paper presents a simple cost and efficiency model for face-to-face communication. Based on this model and based on a desired communication benchmark, we are able to compute the optimal communication topology by minimizing the cost/efficiency ratio. The goal is to apply the model for optimizing the knowledge transfer within the knowledge networks at Siemens PSE. These geographically distributed knowledge networks are the key ingredients representing the bottom up component of the technology management process at Siemens PSE.