The social enterprise

The immediate goal was to coordinate far-forward troops and humanitarian agencies. Rasmussen rates the outcome a success. Later, he adds, “they began to talk to each other, civil to military, Kuwaiti to Brit, U.S. Army Civil Affairs to U.S. Marine Civil Affairs” — and those conversations led to the creation of the Iraqi Health Logistics Center.

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Selling by Six Degrees

For Tacit’s Gilmour, the hard problem is figuring out “who knows what.” Given a set of connections among people, documents, and topics, he says figuring out “who knows who” is straightforward, which is why Tacit now wants to add that capability to its product. Websites that build, visualize, and exploit social networks — including Ryze, LinkedIn, Friendster, Spoke Software, and Orkut — have exploded on the scene. Software visualization of relationship networks has been around for years. It wasn’t until recently, though, that these online services made the technique available to millions of people.

For the average business user, such services are most helpful when searching for potential employers, employees, or partners. But relationship maps are of special interest to salespeople, who are desperate to abolish dreaded the cold call. Recruiting is a perennial hot topic, but the new killer app for social networking software in the enterprise will deliver relationships that salespeople can leverage.

“There is an instant, intuitive understanding on the part of the VP of sales that the sales process relies on these relationship networks,” says Antony Brydon, CEO of Visible Path. His company’s software, in limited use but not yet generally available, doesn’t read your e-mail or documents. Its relationship-mining engine does, however, absorb your contacts from all available sources: CRM/SFA systems, e-mail systems, and desktop contact managers. Of these sources, CRM and SFA contribute shockingly little to the relationship map; Brydon pegs the number at about 2 percent. Visible Path’s modus operandi is to “find the 98 percent of relationships overlooked by Siebel and SalesForce” and make them accessible from within those applications.

Like other social networking applications, Visible Path brokers introductions through a chain of anonymous intermediaries, revealing private information only with consent. The network’s scope is corporate, not global, which Brydon says uniquely qualifies his product as enterprise software.

Steve Pope, president of Applied Marketing Services, a consultancy that helps commercial real estate brokers find business, describes one trial deployment of Visible Path in an office of 22 brokers. “It’s an age-old problem,” says Pope. “Brokers want to guard their connections, but the decision on a building in Kansas City may get made in Chicago, and collaboration is what’s really going to win the deal.” Without robust privacy assurance it could never happen. But once users see that they’re in control of the opportunities, and are anonymous in their responses, they warm up to the idea quickly. “If you sit there and let the equipment do its data mining,” Pope says, “your phone may ring.”

The trial has been so successful that Pope now envisions broader use of the software. Extended to an extranet, it could enable real estate brokers and commercial furniture salespeople to share their complementary relationship networks. For Chris Tolles, VP of marketing at Spoke Software, the bigger the network, the better. “This is a Web-required space,” he says. “A large, open network is much more powerful than a small, closed one.” According to Tolles, Spoke takes a dual approach. The company sells an enterprise version of the application for use behind the firewall. But the internal relationships can be federated with those arising from activity on the public Spoke network. The union of private and public profiles is only visible internally, though. Members of the public Spoke network can’t see IBM’s firewalled relationship data.

Social protocols are notoriously tricky to implement in software, and we’ll see lots of experimentation and tuning as things progress. Consider sales and recruiting, the low-hanging fruit of enterprise social software. What happens if somebody ignores a request for an introduction and cuts in on a deal? Along with automated relationship mapping and introductions, we’ll need to define and enforce what Pope calls rules of engagement. Even in an anonymous network, everything is ultimately trackable. “That’s going to open up a lot of the dirty little secrets,” Pope says, and “shine a light in the dark corners of our business.”

Can transparency and privacy coexist? Tacit’s Gilmour argues by analogy that they can. We have a reasonable expectation that our phones aren’t bugged, he says. If our voice mailboxes fill up and we become unresponsive, though, that becomes an issue that will be noticed and dealt with. The enterprise has a legitimate interest in finding bottlenecks. “Privacy privileges are constructive when applied to who-knows-what and who-knows-whom,” he says. “But we don’t think you’re entitled to privacy about whether you’re available for interaction.”

Are we entering a brave new world or is cyberspace catching up to the way things work in meatspace? The answer to both questions is yes.