About us

Leading the Future of Organizational Network Analysis

At Polinode, we are driven by a simple yet powerful vision: to revolutionize the way organizations function through the insights of both Active and Passive Organizational Network Analysis. Since 2014, we've been empowering businesses to enhance collaboration, optimize efficiency, and improve employee experiences. Discover our journey, the partnerships we’ve forged, and the mission that continues to inspire us.
We provide a platform for both Active and Passive Organizational Network Analysis
Polinode was founded in 2014 by Andrew Pitts with the vision to make Organizational Network Analysis broadly available in order to improve the way that organizations function - for the benefit of both the organization and the individual employees within those organizations. Learn more below about who we are and why we do what we do!
Founding story
For the origin of Polinode we need to go back more than a decade to 2012. The founder of Polinode, Andrew Pitts, was working at Goldman Sachs in New York in Investment Banking. While at Goldman he was appointed to an internal committee looking at questions around culture and attrition. It was this experience that led him to think about organizations as networks - complex evolving networks. He immediately realized the powerful insights that Organizational Network Analysis could provide and also how it could be used to improve organizational effectiveness (and improve the experience of individual employees at the same time!).

Andrew, originally from Australia, resigned from his job at Goldman and moved home to Sydney, Australia. Once in Sydney, he started building. He built Polinode as a tool to make Organizational Network Analysis generally accessible and available to all but without diluting the powerful insights that could be derived from it. The first version of Polinode was released to a small beta group of users in 2014 shortly after the company was incorporated.

That initial version of Polinode was primarily a tool for Active ONA, i.e. asking questions like “Who do you go to for advice?”, “Who do you want more access to?” and so on. There was also a relatively simple interactive network analysis and visualization tool in that early version of Polinode. We owe a large debt of gratitude to that initial beta group - they helped us put Polinode to use in the real world and gave us invaluable feedback which has helped Polinode evolve into the tool that it is today.

Today Polinode is a tool for both Active and Passive Organizational Network Analysis. We added our passive data integrations a couple of years after the Active ONA functionality. At the heart of Polinode though is our incredibly powerful yet intuitive interactive network analysis and visualization functionality. It has evolved a great deal since our initial version and a new version was released in 2024 (Polinode 2.0) with a large number of new features and improvements. The underlying mission and motivation for Polinode though remains unchanged - we use the power of networks to improve the effectiveness of organizations.
Who we work with today
Today we work with some of the largest and most innovative companies in the world. Sometimes we provide only our software and sometimes we work more closely as thought partners with those organizations to help them maximize the value they receive from their investments in ONA. There is no one industry that we work more closely with but we find that those industries that are particularly focussed on human capital and knowledge work tend to invest more in network analysis. This includes Healthcare, Financial Services, Technology and Pharmaceuticals but our clients are by no means limited to those industries.

We realized many years ago that delivering all of the benefits that ONA has to offer was not possible to do as a single entity - we needed to build up a network of consultants and service providers around Polinode. We are proud today to have such a rich and welcoming community around Polinode - there are over 30 consulting organizations that we officially classify as Polinode Partners but there are many other individuals and organizations that are part of this community.
What motivates and inspires us?
Our mission has remained unchanged since Polinode was first established in 2014 - we are passionate about using the power of networks to improve organizations
We like to think that we remain intellectually curious and love to share the knowledge that we have accumulated over the years. We are also very conscious that we are part of a broader community and network. We may have helped popularize and make ONA more broadly available but the origins of ONA pre-date Polinode. We stand on the shoulders of giants and are also inspired every day by the work of our partners and clients.
How to get in touch?
You will find a few different forms on this website to fill in….but we try to always be responsive and accessible. The fastest and easiest way to get in touch with us is to send an email to [email protected]. We typically reply to emails within 24 hours. Existing customers should email [email protected] to ensure they get the fastest possible response.

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