Data mining unearths hidden talent

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.

Well, that’s the idea but I am still some way short of attaining this level of wisdom. I haven’t even got a long white beard and am still asked for ID in Asda. But having just reached the milestone of 30 relatively uneventful years on this planet, I’ve been feeling particularly melodramatic and prone to grandiose statements.

So with that in mind I boldly predict the imminent arrival of a massive new industry associated with enterprise social networking ­ not so much Web 2.0 as Web 2 3/4. All the big names ­ Oracle, Google, IBM, Microsoft ­ are throwing development dollars at it. It’s really all about re-inventing that notoriously tricky discipline of knowledge management, and making it work.

One UK company that is at the forefront of this burgeoning area is Trampoline Systems. The Shoreditch-based startup recently pulled off a bit of a coup by poaching Peter Biddle from the mighty Microsoft.

Now, it must take something major to persuade the lead developer of Vista’s BitLocker encryption tool and creator of the Darknet private virtual network concept to move to London and get involved in all this. Biddle told me he believes the enterprise social networking sector could be as big as the security industry in years to come.

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.

Web 2 3/4 ­ or enterprise social networking ­ has huge potential, but that may not be enough for it to truly take off. The trouble is that firms have been burned once before by knowledge management systems, back in the late 1990s, and there could be resistance to splashing the cash on yet more technology that claims to do similar things.

According to Biddle, one of the main problems Trampoline faces in reaching out to potential customers is that the company is trying to sell into a category that doesn’t really exist, and addressing problems that many firms don’t know they have.

A big marketing effort needs to be made by Trampoline and the other players beavering away in this embryonic space to create a vocabulary that IT managers will understand and respond to.