Organizations already possess, and have paid dearly for, a huge amount of information about their internal network of relationships. Baseline data establishes the hierarchy of jobs, managers, and organization units. This basic data needs to be refreshed regularly to mark changes like the movement of people through jobs, jobs added and eliminated, and vacancies. Some data is scattered through several enterprise data systems, like contractors and team memberships. A small amount of data, matrix reports and process workflows, needs an initial investment in gathering and can be made part of the positional data. Then there is a large amount of information flow data available that can be associated with organizations, teams, and positions. Not so finally, there is the data mining for social networks, an effort to understand organization networks through people networks. This data, appropriately privacy protected, can be powerfully associated with working positions and roles.

• Employee Position Nodes: Easy to find. Arises from the unique record of each job, including the authorizing manager for that job, that is held by Finance and HR. This data provides a network of the whole employee population as one comprehensive organization chart.
• Contractor Position Nodes: Probably available, but needs to be extracted, most likely from IT sources. The increasing use of contractors to fill in hollowed-out organizations or to lower costs or to acquire specialized skills or other reasons in a rapidly changing environment means the true shape and size of the organization is becoming more obscure to the formal management structure

• Type A1 Direct Reporting: The whole single-link hierarchy of organizations, management teams, managers, and staff is automatically generated from existing data in Finance, HR, and IT (sometimes). This gives every person-position a place as a node in the organization network and a title role in a management team. All other relationships and relevant nodes (e.g., contractors) connect to this core configuration, the totality of which is the employee-defined organizational boundary
• Type A2 Matrix Reporting: essential and growing type of relationship rarely part of any data system. Finance most likely to have a start on this information, but it requires an initial leadership effort to collect all existing matrix relationships
• Type B Process Flow: rarely represented on organization charts but a great deal of workflow information is inherent in organization and team names and position titles, which needs to be decoded by knowledgeable leaders. The work process picture for the organization as a whole would be filled out by the complete network of management and specialized executive team leaders. The work process for the team would be articulated internally, an interrelated mix of formal and informal roles and tasks
• Type C Team Memberships: This data most likely held by IT but will need to be systematically abstracted from a variety of existing lists. Over time, it is the bottoms-up self-definition of teams that would fully fill out the organization’s knowledge regarding all its key working units.
• Type D Information Flows: IT holds a vast amount of access and interaction data, to say nothing about email and other communications traffic, that can be mined to generate position-to-position information flows. While such traffic is now analyzed for clues to social networks, within organizations that traffic is most likely generated by people-in-positions acting in one or another of their roles in various teams