Trampoline Systems has launched
what it claims is the world's first organisational intelligence and
diagnostics tool.
Charles Armstrong, CEO of the company, which describes itself as
an enterprise social computing pioneer, told Computer Weekly he
spent a year in the Isles of Scilly studying village life, to work
out why real social networks are so efficient at channeling
resources. His rationale was to capture that quality and instil it
into automated systems for corporations.
"I'm not a traditional IT person," said Armstrong. "My
background is in ethnography. I wanted to know why villages are so
good at getting the right information to the right people, but
corporations are so ineffcient. So I spent a year on St Agnes
looking at the rules of social networks."
Following the research, Sonar Dashboard was launched. This tool
uses social network tools - akin to
Facebook and
MySpace - to allow end users
to communicate with other interested parties in a corporate
environment.
The company has now launched Sonar Flightdeck, a management tool
that visualises high-value strategic information from everyday
communications. According to Trampoline, the system automatically
displays the crucial social factors at play within organisations,
including key opinion formers, poorly integrated business units,
emerging communities of interest, single points of failure and
third-party relationships.
"This intelligence was largely anecdotal before," explained
Armstrong. "Now the company has more formal methods of identifying
the good and the bad performers, collaboration and innovation and
the high risk, low-data integrations."
Armstrong identified a new group of key influential workers, who
know everybody and everything going on in a company. "I call them
the information brokers," he said.
"Industry spent billions in the 90s on business intelligence,"
said Armstrong. "These were fantastic systems, but they only looked
at information and documents. What we're analysing here is
something far more important. Human resources."