Trampoline offers relationship mapping tool

British company Trampoline Systems has launched "the world's first organizational intelligence and diagnostic" tool that it claims will help IT executives better identify the key individuals within their organizations.

Trampoline says that Sonar Flightdeck collates information from across an organization by using network analysis techniques "to expose the social networks and information flows contained within everyday electronic communications."

Sonar Flightdeck takes information from sources such as IMs, e-mails, databases and data repositories, and provides IT managers with visual representations of information flows and social networks within their organization. This, the company says, allows executives to identify "key opinion formers, poorly-integrated business units, emerging communities of interest, single points of failure and third-party relationships."

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British company Trampoline Systems has launched "the world's first organizational intelligence and diagnostic" tool that it claims will help IT executives better identify the key individuals within their organizations.

Trampoline says that Sonar Flightdeck collates information from across an organization by using network analysis techniques "to expose the social networks and information flows contained within everyday electronic communications."

Sonar Flightdeck takes information from sources such as IMs, e-mails, databases and data repositories, and provides IT managers with visual representations of information flows and social networks within their organization. This, the company says, allows executives to identify "key opinion formers, poorly-integrated business units, emerging communities of interest, single points of failure and third-party relationships."

"Sonar Flightdeck extends the scope of enterprise social computing by bringing the specialized techniques of organizational network analysis to business users," said Charles Armstrong, CEO of Trampoline Systems. "It derives vital intelligence from the millions of fragments of electronic information flowing around an organization and presents it in interactive visualizations. Sonar Flightdeck reveals the strategic insight that has long been locked inside everyday communications."

Speaking to Techworld, Armstrong dismissed claims that the ability to map human influences within an organization is somewhat far-fetched.

"A lot of these techniques are already well established in consulting world," he said. "It is known as organizational network analysis. It is not rocket science we are doing."

"Large corporations already use organizational network analysis," he said. "Traditionally, it consists of surveys of employees, and then statistical tools take that information, and use it to establish for example who are the 'information brokers' (i.e. key people) in the organization, and which teams are not well integrated."

"These are well established techniques," he insisted. "We have taken those techniques and put the technology into an algorithmic form. We can do that the same thing as traditional organizational network analysis, but in real-time, with significant breakdown of data, so you can monitor what people are actually doing, rather than in a questionnaire."

"This is especially valuable in a merger and acquisition situation, when executives want to identify the key people," said Armstrong. "Management can then make sure that these key people (or information brokers) are happy and will stay. Sonar Flightdeck provides statistical hard data about who is valuable."

Armstrong then demonstrated how Sonar Flightdeck visually identifies the key people in a particular organization, and how these people interact and relate to other individuals, departments, and indeed overseas branches of the same organization.

Trampoline believes that "businesses are increasingly aware that informal, peer to peer networks are the real powerhouse of their organizations."