Briefs

New enterprise social networking tools can help firms to quickly put together teams of inhouse experts

IT Week, 28 Sep 2007

There�s a certain kind of penetrating insight that comes from spending far too long in one industry. You can begin to predict trends before they arrive, spot the fads that will never make it while everyone else is hyping them up, and generally separate the Betamaxes from the VHSes.

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Trampoline�s own flagship product, Sonar, works by sucking all the information from a firm�s data sources � emails, databases, document stores and so on � and running specially designed algorithms on it to work out which people are good at certain tasks, how they interact and so on. All of which could be incredibly useful to firms that need to assemble project teams quickly and basically haven�t a clue where to start.

An email, for example, can be mined for all sorts of information, explained Biddle, depending on whether it was forwarded without being opened, deleted, or read. With this and other information, those clever algorithms can deduce the expertise of the people sending the emails.

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