One of the surefire ways to increment my consulting tachometer is hot technology. I’ll admit it. Despite my attempts to present a modicum of cool, at my core I am a geek. Specifically, shiny new software, developed with usability (or just users) in mind, really tunes my sousaphone. And today, I am ready to try out for first chair in the e2 orchestra after seeing a demo of Trampoline Systems‘ SONAR platform.

So, here is the deal: put simply, SONAR consumes corporate content and context from various sources like email, LDAP, file systems, etc and generates a navigable, discoverable, and usable social map of the enterprise. Throw in a slick UI, security concessions, and the elimination of alter-ego-projecting through NLP-powered-auto-tagging, and you are left with what I consider one of the better takes on Facebook or LinkedIn within the enterprise. Moreover, it climbs the “combining enterprise search with social context” mountain from the people side, not the content side. Frankly, this sort of seems like where enterprise search (especially for the vaunted knowledge worker) should have grown from, not grown toward. (Nice grammar, chief.) Finally, Trampoline Systems tacks on a management layer with Metascope that allows for human capital management and organizational network analysis, producing results ranging from the productively insightful to the nefariously Orwellian. A couple use cases immediately jumped to mind when looking at the demo:

• Resource Management - Find experts, leverage weak ties, connect people with content, etc. Added Bonus - connections and themes (read competencies) are based on NLP of actual, generated content . Not people’s perceptions of their competencies. Proclaimed SMEs are more likely to be worth the paper upon which their robustly wordsmithed CV is written. (Wait…your resume isn’t inflated? Weird. That makes one of us.)
• Human Capital Management - To be honest, the HCM line on my resume is completely made up. Thus, I will not try to explain the seemingly complex (and purposely opaque?) discipline. However, if you posit yourself as an HCM guru, and don’t see the applicability of something like this, my guess is your resume could give mine a run for its money in the BS 500.
• Mergers and Acquisitions - This might border on sinister, but the Trampoline stack uses a couple measures to determine the “efficiency” of network nodes. Buying a company soon? Want to know who should weather the storm? This could probably help.

These are just a few quick thoughts, and a bit of hyperbolic glad-handing, but the functionality really does add up to a compelling stab at social intelligence. My sense is that Trampoline will have to further refine the raw data harvesting and indexing mechanisms underneath the pretty hood of SONAR, and overcome the challenges of enforcing disparate application security paradigms, but they are headed in the right direction for sure. My favorite quote from their presentation:

“To drive performance and innovation, leaders must begin to manage connectivity as a critical resource in the organization.”

I couldn’t agree more.

One more thing…even if you think Enterprise 2.0 is a stop on an elevator at a Star Trek convention and could care less about me, Jay, or the Internet in general, you should still take a look at Trampoline’s Enron Explorer. I love the smell of hubris in the morning.

Neither Nate Nash or Jay Hariani was compensated in any way for this post.