Expertise Location (Part 2)

[Part 1] We’re talking with Charles Armstrong. One of the reasons I have chosen this topic is that I believe, it is one of the best applications for the enterprise to leverage web 2.0 principles.

Charles Armstrong is Founder & CEO of Trampoline Systems. An ethnographer turned technology entrepreneur, Charles studied Social & Political Science at the University of Cambridge and was subsequently mentored by the eminent sociologist Lord Young of Dartington.

SM: What is your target customer for SONAR?
CA: SONAR is a horizontally applicable application, targeted at large organisations and enterprises across industries. It can be used both within specific departments as a smaller deployment, or throughout the whole organisation.

SM: What is the competition, and how do you differentiate?
CA: We are not aware of anyone with a directly competitive offering. Here are two other players in the market and how we differentiate from them.

Autonomy: The archetypal first-wave knowledge management solution provides sophisticated semantic analysis of content but does not take into account the relationships or social networks operating behind it. Time-consuming and expensive training and consultancy is required for deployment, unlike the SONAR appliance which begins to give value as soon as it is connected to a corporate network.

Microsoft SharePoint 2007: The new Knowledge Network component offers expertise location but with no analysis of the social activity occurring in organisations. Unlike SONAR, it requires client-side installation and only functions in a 100% Microsoft environment.

SM: While Charles was working on electronic communication projects with large organisations he became fascinated by the dysfunction of corporate information systems, and had a hunch that something was interfering with instinctive behaviour.

His desire to understand the underlying behaviours led him to spend twelve months living on St. Agnes, one of the Isles of Scilly (a group of islands in the English Channel off the south west tip of the UK), which is 2 km by 1.5 km in area and has 80 inhabitants. He took on the role of a social entrepreneur, setting up an initiative to support IT skills. His research was conducted with an emphasis on informal observation, questioning and learning with a formal interview process towards the end of the project. The conclusions from this research led to the foundation and direction of Trampoline, and form the underlying principles of its products.

(to be continued)

[Part 1]
[Part 2]
[Part 3]
[Product Review]

This segment is part 2 in the series : Expertise Location
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