It’s not every day you get to announce an entirely new technology category, but judging by reactions from the analysts I’ve spoken to today I suspect that’s what we’ve just done. Up until now the bulk of discussion around social computing has focused on how it empowers end users: providing people with direct routes to information, services and relationships that would previously have required an intermediary layer of some kind. Indeed the initial functionality in our SONAR platform was directed to empowering individual employees in just this way, making it easy for them to reach across the corporate ecosystem and link with people who have expertise, connections or interests relevant to what they’re working on.

But in the course of talking with customers during the second half of 2007 it became apparent that there was a second set of equally pressing needs which nobody had recognised, let alone set about addressing. In a word: management. In a large enterprise decisions are constantly being made based on assumptions about how different teams and units are linked together and which people are essential to the success of any particular process or initiative. These are sometimes million-dollar decisions but they’re being made on the basis of anecdotal evidence which is at best incomplete and at worst plain wrong. Who hasn’t come across a situation where the loud-mouth executive who appears to be crucial to a particular department moves on without causing a ripple, but when the unassuming person a couple of rungs below them goes on vacation things immediately collapse into chaos?

The problem is that managers have never had any fact-based tool to give them insight into how well teams are working together, how effectively their unit is sharing information with the rest of the organisation, which customer relationships need a tighter focus and who are the unrecognised people that help keep everything working smoothly. This is absolutely the realm of social computing, it’s all about taking analytic approaches from the social sciences and turning them into algorithms. So towards the end of 2007 we decided this was a field where Trampoline should lead the way and commenced the work the led to today’s launch of SONAR Flightdeck.

Initially I suspect a lot of the interest will come from fields like Change Management and Mergers & Acquisitions which have particularly acute needs for real-time insights into organisational structures and performance factors. But tools like Flightdeck (I’m sure others will follow where we have led) will rapidly establish themselves as a normal part of the enterprise management toolset. The Business Intelligence wave of the 1990s probably is a good analogue. Enterprises were swimming in financial information but managers had no way to get a real-time snapshot of the status of a particular account or transaction. BI applications emerged to fill this need and now they’re taken for granted. Flightdeck heralds a similar phenomenon, just dealing with human factors instead of financial ones.

One of the challenges of creating a new product category is the difficulty of predicting exactly what features will be most important to users and how people will prefer to interact with the tool. We’re already working with a couple of beta partners but we’d love to talk with more businesses that have issues that Flightdeck could help with. If you’re interested please get in touch with Adrian Jones (adrian [at] trampolinesystems [dot] com) or phone him on +44 (0)20 7253 6959. Thanks!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 4:41 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.