Mathematics as quantitative support to Human Resources Management

The organizational structure of a company is a relational and social network of employees. You can associate this network to a database, in which every node contains measurable information about the employee itself (technical skills, activities inside the company, languages spoken...) and every link contains measurable information about the nature of the relation between the employees (number of weekly contacts, hierarchical positions, past collaboration, flow of activities...). Filling this data structure helps to understand how the work is done inside the company (despite how the work is organized). But once you have a measurable features, you can make a step over and apply optimization algorithms using this data structure to find out what is the set of best choices for a given management problem. For example, team building can be seen as a clustering problem with respect to some given criteria, or facing the unavailability of an element of the network can be seen as the design of a survivable network. A modern company dealing with a high number of employees will benefit from the introduction of such a methodology. The challenge is to use mathematics where all the managers have always relied only on their common sense. The result will only be an approximation because human beings and relations between them are highly complex to describe, but still a great margin of costs reduction and possible synergies recognition exists