Requester concentration and workload dependence
Requester concentration is high when a small set of stable requester identities accounts for a large share of operational demand. Measure both request counts and defensible effort exposure, test the result under alternate identity groupings, and avoid treating concentrated demand as unnecessary demand.
This is a dependency and planning study. It does not rank requester value, assign blame, or show what workload could be removed.
The 2023 US merger guidelines describe markets with a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index above 1,800 as highly concentrated and flag a merger that raises the index by more than 100 points in such a market. The DOJ merger guidelines provide transparent arithmetic, but those legal market thresholds must not be imported as workload-risk cutoffs.
Define requester identity
Choose whether the unit is a person, account, department, customer, location, or channel before aggregating. Preserve the raw identity and maintain a versioned crosswalk so renamed or merged entities do not appear as new demand sources.
Keep unknown and shared identities visible. Assigning a shared inbox to the most common user can manufacture concentration.
Freeze the eligible request population and observation window. Exclude records only under declared rules and report excluded counts by reason.
Measure more than volume
Calculate each requester share of entries, handling touches, elapsed exposure, and completed work where those fields are reliable. A requester with many simple requests can dominate volume but not effort, while a low-volume requester can dominate specialist time.
Report the largest shares, a cumulative concentration curve, and at least one all-requester summary. Show raw counts beside every percentage and avoid a threshold chosen after seeing the result.
Repeat the calculation by week or month. A single annual value can hide seasonal projects, temporary incidents, or a recent structural change.
Test sensitivity and context
Recalculate after grouping known aliases and after separating shared accounts. If conclusions change materially, identity resolution is part of the finding.
Stratify by request type, required skill, and channel. Concentration may reflect a legitimate ownership model, a specialized workflow, or inconsistent intake rather than dependency on one relationship.
Compare arrival concentration with capacity coverage. Demand concentrated in one requester becomes a different operational risk when several people can handle it than when one specialist holds the only access or knowledge.
Use the result carefully
The study can identify where planning depends on a small number of demand sources and where identity data is weak. It cannot determine whether those requests are valuable, avoidable, or appropriately scoped without process-owner review.
An operations coordinator can maintain requester crosswalks, recurring summaries, and exceptions. Service and business owners decide whether the pattern calls for intake changes, cross-training, capacity reserves, or no action.
The demand coverage study addresses capacity alignment, the arrival clustering study examines timing, and the Research index collects related designs.
Sources and limits
- DOJ merger guidelines, for the HHI formula, 1,800 threshold, and 100-point change used in US merger analysis.
- Economic Census program, for official establishment, industry, and sales measures.
- Census business dynamics, for longitudinal establishment entry, exit, and employment measures.
- BLS industry productivity, for official output, hours, and productivity series by industry.
- BEA industry data, for official industry output and input-output accounts.
- Federal procurement data, for documented award, recipient, agency, and category fields in public spending records.
- DOJ HHI explanation, for the index calculation and interpretation of market shares.
- NIST supply-chain practices, for identifying and managing dependency risk across suppliers.
- Census SUSB data, for firm and establishment counts by industry and enterprise size.
- FRED industry series, for documented industry-level economic series and source metadata.
The DOJ thresholds govern a specific competition-law analysis, not requester management. An internal study should publish its identity crosswalk, observation window, count and effort measures, and sensitivity results without labeling a requester as risky or dispensable.