Six Degrees of Separation

The Scenario

At MITRE, leveraging expertise from across the company was essential to our business and value. The 'Six Degrees of Separation' prototype was built to facilitate networking by identifying connections between you and any other employee.  The app used multiple data sources including the Microsoft Graph, Slack messages, organization data, project charges, and document co-authors to identify likely relationships. As we improved the graph and integrated it into other applications, it was quickly adopted with over 70% of the company using it to explore their connections.

My Role

I improved the organization of the development team's initial prototype and designed new ways to visualize the connection data, including  incorporating it into People Profiles and Career Match. I also worked closely with the development team to improve the relevance of their graph data, such as prioritizing reporting relationships and filtering out overly broad project connections that didn't represent meaningful collaboration.

Sample Strongest Path graph. Source: MITRE