ABSTRACT
Siemens is a world leader in electrical engineering and electronics. Siemens believes in a strong customer oriented approach, which means that the company is actively thinking about technical and societal issues together with their customers. Siemens NL is not conducting much actual basic research through their Dutch subsidiary, SNL is very active in the development stage of new products and services. Reflecting the general structure of the Siemens mother company, Siemens NL is organized according to a matrix structure. This means that divisions have to report to the board of directors of Siemens as well as to the Bereichen of the German mother company. To investigate the issue of inter-divisional communication, Hans decided to look at communication networks into more detail. The visualization gave Hans a first impression of how open or closed the networks actually were. Looking at both networks it appeared that divisional membership formed an important reason for employees to cluster together.
