Smarter tools for picking brains

IT Week: As chief executive and founder of enterprise Web 2.0 firm Trampoline Systems, at what stage of maturity is the Web 2.0 market?

Armstrong: Web 2.0 has been getting a lot of attention in the past few months, so we’ve had many meetings and conversations with potential customers. While this is very heartening for us, the discussion at enterprise level is still at a very early stage. Wikis and blogs are there at a totemic level but it’ll be interesting to see when that moves further. Web 2.0 is clearly an emerging market and a small percentage of CIOs really get it and they probably got it years ago, and those are the people we’re getting most interest from. Then there is a wider swathe of people with sharp instincts who understand something disruptive is about to happen and change things. A lot of interest is clearly driven by the feeling that they ought to have some strategy in this area and are testing the water. As more executives use Facebook and other sites, something very powerful is happening in terms of CIOs getting what the potential is.

Can you explain what you mean by the term “enterprise Web 2.0”?
There’s something very interesting about the way organisations use digital information systems. In the past 30 to 40 years, enterprises had to train people to fit in with how machines worked, but enterprise Web 2.0 is presaged on a new generation of information systems getting organisations to join together the pieces of the puzzle and opening up productivity gains based on harnessing collective intelligence. In this way, communities can pull information structures around to meet their needs.

How did you come to think about knowledge sharing and communities in an IT context?
I was interested in the human element of it as an ethnographer so I looked at small communities and tried to understand their social behaviour that enabled them to distribute information efficiently. A small village is vastly more efficient at doing this with no electronic communications than a large enterprise.

How do you apply these concepts to an enterprise IT product?
The Sonar platform is the purest expression of our vision. Several applications plug into the network and it integrates with whatever pieces of the infrastructure it’s looking to draw intelligence from: the email server, a CMS system like Documentum, a contact database, an instant messenger platform or blogs and wikis. It’s very agnostic about what it connects to and then it mines data and works out each individual social network in the organisation ­ what each person is working on, what their expertise is ­ and then provides a variety of functionality and services on top of that.

What are the majority of your customers applying this technology to?
The single biggest application people are asking for is expertise search. IBM did some research a couple of years ago on expertise in the organisation that found 70 to 80 per cent of expertise is learned informally and known to a circle of people immediately surrounding the individual. Expertise is the core asset an organisation has so ways to capture it and make it available are very valuable. Expertise search builds on a language model Sonar maintains for every individual and a background language model for the whole organisation that evolves with every new email passing through the system.

How long does it take to get started?
You can be up and running with Sonar in about two days. It’s distributed on appliances so you can plug it in and it integrates to the email server easily like an email archiving product. It pulls in information from different sources ­ contacts databases, HR skills databases and so on ­ and uses visualisation to show the social networks, so you can browse by subject area, area of expertise and other [parameters].

Are there other applications for the technology?
E-discovery and compliance are two areas where visualisation tools can come into play ­ you can get an overview of who’s talking about what in the organisation.

Have security concerns presented a barrier to adoption?
Privacy and security is an important requirement and we put a lot of work into finding the right balance between getting the information shared and making sure every user can control what’s being shared. Every two weeks users will get an email saying that there are new connections that have been picked up and they can mark which ones they don’t want to be shared. Then they have a two-week grace period and anything not marked as private will get shared.

Are there any other barriers?
The user experience is something we saw in the boom in knowledge management tools in the 1990s when there were a lot of competing products but they delivered no value because they weren’t used. We have to learn lessons from that. The role of visualisation in the user interface is important because it invites the user to explore ­ it takes a very complex thing and by making it visual makes it instantly intelligible.

Are other vendors investing in this area of technology?
Autonomy is doing similar things and Oracle is providing us with engineers to integrate with our Sonar product. The key area of value for us is the black box at the centre with its algorithms, natural language processing, social network analysis and ability to analyse the relationships between people.