Bouncing back to social intelligence

I know it's only been a week or two since I last wrote about enterprise social intelligence, but I just had a sneak preview of the latest release from Trampoline Systems. This is the newest offering in the firm's ongoing quest to provide organisations with the tools to extract and use the latent knowledge of their workforce. And it's called Sonar Dashboard.

Following the firm's earlier releases Sonar Server – the technology which effectively sucks out all the information from different corporate systems – and Flightdeck – the management diagnostics tool, Dashboard is actually what the end users get to play with.

Chief executive Charles Armstrong told me they've gone for the look and feel of a social networking site to minimise user training to virtually zero. And if you've been on Facbook or LinkedIn you'll have absolutely no problems using it. The main page look s a bit like a Facebook profile page, with regular updates on what all your contacts are currently working on.

Another page allows you to view the main topics a particular contact has been working on – the ones in larger and bolder type being the ones they've been involved in more often – and who they've been talking to. There's also an area where you can input information about yourself, upload CV or connect to your LinkedIn profile. As is Trampoline's wont, relationships between contacts can be viewed in an easy-to-digest graphical format.

Privacy is also a key factor here. Users can view an email every two weeks listing which information has been collected about the projects they're working on, and they can then choose which bits they want hidden from their contacts. In these days of uber-sensitivity about privacy and surreptitious data mining, it's an important part of the trampoline jigsaw.

I guess the point with this release is that the vendor is trying to avoid the mistakes of the unwieldy knowledge management systems of the 90s, by enabling the automatic extraction and updating of individuals' key information. In other words it does all the heavy lifting and, as Armstrong says, is why a consumer-type social networking tool is no good for this purpose, because it depends wholly on the individual to update their details themselves.