As the clock ticks down toward inauguration, our new president and his aides are faced with the daunting challenge of smoothly executing a significant transition effort. While I have no basis or expertise in politics, my guess is that this will be a real barnburner in terms of complexity, risk of information loss, and aneurism potential. I suppose change on any level is always difficult, but something of this magnitude sounds like it might actually require some “management”. Change management that is…

The Transition Project is also tasked with reviewing hundreds of agencies and programs in the federal government and selecting new personnel to manage these important offices. Among the personnel that will be selected will be new Cabinet members, national security and federal law enforcement officials, non-career appointments, and other heads of agencies across the Executive Branch. - http://change.gov

As I was pondering this issue (Oh how I love to ponder…mostly because it usually results in little action or responsibility…sort of like blogging or legal advice) the recent conversations with my friends at Trampoline Systems came to mind. We have been running an underground pilot of the SONAR platform for the past few months and are preparing to expand to a much larger user base. While discussing the business case (wait…hold the phone Nancy! Enterprise 2.0 has a business case??), the use of Flightdeck for rapid fire analysis of massive workforce changes piqued my curiosity.

The basic idea is that there seems to be a significant amount of change occurring these days. Whether it be massive bank layoffs or presidential baton-passing, the effects are the same:

People, their contacts, and their tacit knowledge are leaving the organization. Usually for good.  

So how do you know what is leaving with those people? How do you pick the right people to go? Can you assign a value to their loss? In the past, I would posit that at best, the answers to these questions were educated guesses. But with Flightdeck, you have insight into the true impacts of workforce decisions. By using the SONAR platform to process the corpus of an organization’s exisiting social media (email for example), management has a real and immiediate view into the connections between people as well as the content being discussed. (Sounds like useful social media to me). Using this perspective, it is far easier to make informed decisions based on not only who is leaving, but what knowledge or expertise is riding shotgun. 

I believe social networks and competency profiles based on real-life actions are more appropriate for the enterprise. Facebook-esque platforms are neato but leave a bit to be desired when it comes to proving business cases like the one above. You see, SONAR doesn’t lie. I can’t “friend” someone important (like a client or VP) and legitimately beef up my rolodex. I can’t self-declare “DBA” to save myself from a non-technical workforce reduction. I not only have to actually converse with people to create a connection, but the content must be of value.

By being smart about the way you implement or expose social media within the enterprise, the use of its data can expand to include the vaunted and much sought after holy grail of “measurable metrics”. Analyzing existing content and connections with something like SONAR, can give you immediate access to not only the “who”, but the “what”, impacted by your decisions. Ultimately, accessing that information effectively can help mitigate creating change that costs more than it saves.