More Wirearchy On The Way ?

Via the FastForward blog …

The potential for creating elements of what I call the dark side of wirearchy is clearly evident, IMO

I was aware of a component named SONAR of a previously-available enterprise system from Leadership.com (that site no longer exists, it seems) and I can’t remember clearly whether the company was Trampoline .. what I remember (and found on my old blog, from 2003) was Trilogy Software’s leadership.com offered an application at  leadership.com which exposed and analyzed an organization’s social networks.

Trilogy appears to have moved on … they must have been ahead of Enterprise 2.0’s moment in the sun.  I wonder if Trilogy sold the integrated app (or the SONAR part) to Trampoline ?  It does not look like it, rather it looks like Charles Armstrong built an application / service that does what Leadership.com stated it did four years ago.

The main issue, I think, will always be the degree to which an organization’s management uses such systems and the information it aggregates about people and relationships to manipulate those people, and how the information is used to manipulate.

A "map of social networks, information flows, expertise and individuals’ interests throughout the enterprise" can be a useful thing, and it can also be a very dangerous thing in the hands of an unprincipled and unethical leader or management team.

E 2.0 Breakthrough in Europe: Trampoline Systems Raises $5.8 Million
Jerry Bowles

One of our favorite social software startups (See profile), London-based Trampoline Systems has become the first European “Enterprise 2.0” software developer to receive major investor backing, snagging a £3 million ($5.8m) financing round from affiliates of the Tudor Group. Trampoline intends to use the investment to increase sales operations, intensify R&D and establish a strategic presence in North America. The deal provides further evidence that Enterprise 2.0 is gaining traction with established organizations.

Trampoline is the brainchild of ethnographer turned technology entrepreneur Charles Armstrong. Mentored by sociologist Lord Young of Dartington, Armstrong undertook twelve months of field research in the Isles of Scilly studying the underlying social behaviours involved in information management.

He found that today’s business software works against the methods humans have evolved to distribute information.

The company’s main application is called SONAR (Social Networks And Relevance), an appliance that plugs into the corporate network and connects to existing systems such as email servers, contact databases and document archives and analyzes data in the systems to build a map of social networks, information flows, expertise and individuals’ interests throughout the enterprise.

Tags: Trampoline Systems, Charles Armstrong, Trilogy Software, Leadership.com, social networks, manipulation, wirearchy

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