Human beings are born with a strong innate ability to manage and distribute information.  Even in the remotest societies, people who need to be informed about an important event somehow find out about it–without the benefits of e-mail or instant messaging or even telephones. 

Charles Armstrong, a social scientist and technology entrepreneur, wondered why that natural communications ability seems to diminish or disappear when you put people inside business organizations.  For example, Gartner estimates that employees spend up to 30 percent of their time looking for relevant information on the intranet and that 70 percent to 80 percent of a company’s expertise is learned informally and is invisble to management.

To try to find out why, Armstrong moved for a year to St Agnes, an island with 90 inhabitants that is one of the Isles of Scilly, an archipelago of islands off the southwesternmost tip of the United Kingdom.   Armstrong  watched and listened to how the locals interacted and shared information in their daily comings and goings. One of the “big events” of each week was the arrival of a boat from neighboring St. Mary or the mainland. When the boat was cancelled, which it sometimes was, there might be six people in the village who needed to know. Armstrong found consistently that they would all have that information within hours, even without a formal distribution system, and there would be no ‘verbal’ spam for uninterested people. This feat was accomplished without any formal or even conscious processes.

Armstrong reckoned that employees of modern corporations have the same native instincts and tacit intelligence but they seem to have become crippled by the formal structures and electronic information systems.  Based on his observations, Armstrong patented a new technique for distributing items through a social network that aims to  harness social behavior to manage information better. 

Armstrong and chief technologist Craig McMillan formed Trampoline Systems in 2003 with seed finance from funds and private investors in San Francisco, London and Tokyo. The company’s main application is called SONAR (Social Networks And Relevance), which can run as SaaS or asan appliance that plugs into the corporate network and connects to existing systems such as email servers, contact databases and document archives.

SONAR is a system of plug-in modules (an Intelligence Core for analytics, a user Dashboard, Live Profiles that also provide the user with LinkedIn style contact information,  a Visualizer for mapping social networks,  Discovery, a tool that looks for relevant information, and others to be added this year.  SONAR analyzes data in the systems to build a map of social networks, information flows, expertise and individuals’ interests throughout the enterprise. Basically, it looks for trigger words and phrases that recur frequently, then, like word spreads on an island, passes on the information to the people for whom it will be relevant.  As might be expected, the software contains extensive, multi-level privacy controls, beginning at the user level. 

“SONAR does several things for organizations that they are not doing well at the moment,” Armstrong says.  “It allows them to find  expertise throughout the enterprise that they didn’t know existed.  It keeps employees up to speed on  documents, contacts and discussions that are relevant to their current work and it empowers them to leverage social networks.  Those are enormous benefits.” 

Armstrong is obviously on to something.  In addition to a number of blue chip clients in the U.K., Trampoline Systems has just landed a major pilot with Raytheon, a giant US defence and aerospace business, which is using SONAR to target a specific business need - rapidly pinpointing personnel with specific expertise and relationships across a large pool of employees.