As the enterprise evolves toward Enterprise 2.0 and becomes connected it will increase the social side of content. Connections or linkages between content will become more explicit and more subject to discovery. Blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, and other Web 2.0 tools provide the opportunity to make direct and discoverable linkages between themselves and each other. In this post I want to discuss a tool that combines search with social network analysis that can effectively tap into this social side of content. As the enterprise becomes more connected, this combination will become increasingly useful. First, a disclosure before I start. I have served as an advisor to the firm, iQuest, that produces this tool.

In this blog we have written a lot about participation and participant created content. Web search tools that are most effective take into consideration this participation in delivering their results. For example, Google looks at participant behavior to enhance their search results. In social network analysis terms, it measures your “degree centrality” - how connected are you through its page rank approach. While Google keeps its approach a company secret, it is assumed that one of the central factors in the Google algorithm is the reputation of the site as measured through a site’s degree centrality or who links to the site, who links to the linkers, and who does the site itself link to. This is one reason that well connected blogs show up high in their search results.

There are other approaches to search that make more direct use of social network analysis by combining it with search. One of these is iQuest that uses a form of social network to enhance its search results and content analysis to enhance its social network analysis results. It measures the “between centrality” - are you between important web sites - how important are the connections that passed through your site versus the whole web – and the key word in the search field does not have to be on your site - it can be on the other sites that connect to and through yours. iQuest correlates well with Google but it is harder to spam because of the indirect social network measures. You would to control much of the Web, including the top sites, to spam it.

Both tools return the appropriate sites for the selected search term with links to those sites. However, there is a difference in the results displayed as iQuest also shows you the social network analysis. At the same time, iQuest is different from most social network analysis because it includes a content analysis tool and looks inside the content of electronic communication. Most social network analysis tools simply look at the relationships between participants in this communication. This allows a hybrid tool like iQuest to show you who is talking to whom, what they talk about, when they talk and where those conversations take place. In summary, iQuest marries term less search and social network mapping technologies to analyze structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. It shows you the relative ranking of a site for a specific term and where the most important conversations are taking place around the term.

What does this mean for enterprise search? When you go behind the firewall the nature of content changes. New data opens up such as company records and email exchanges. Most of the content in the Web is unstructured, large amounts of narrative data. The Web search engines are rightly geared to handle this type of content. Behind the firewall the mix shifts and there is more structured data. For example, you now find project status reports and financial results in spreadsheets.

Web search engines like Google generally look at this structured data as unstructured. For example, email addresses or phone numbers need to be treated for what they are and not simply as strings of data. What is needed is a search engine that can be told if it is looking at unstructured or structured data, and then understand the content and make use of the structure if one is present. IQuest can understand the type of data it is looking at and make search decisions based on this understanding. Currently, iQuest is putting development focus on enterprise applications so the tool can also look at known and unknown relationships across all the enterprise databases.

There are a number of enterprise search engines that can address structured and unstructured data but most of these are not capable of looking at the social networks around this data. Just like the web, the world inside the firewall is made up of social relationships. With a tool like iQuest you can both find the content and benefit from understanding the human interactions around content. It opens up the collective intelligence of the enterprise and makes it more accessible. The more that Enterprise 2.0 tools are used to share content, the easier it is to look at the relationships between the content.

You can also look at the nature and substance of social interactions within the enterprise. For example, you can look at the email communication within a project team to see if is functional or dysfunctional. Are key team members being left out? Is someone blocking communication? Are all the right people included? And you can see what they are talking about, making their insights accessible. What are the most used words on a specific topic or specific person? The integration of social network analysis with search opens up new avenues of inquiry and can put greater context to enterprise search.

This power for increased transparency naturally opens up issues of privacy and policy needs to be made to govern proper use. There will always be a need for private conversations and the need for a means for conduct these discussions. However, with the new Web we are living in a world of greater transparency through tools such as blogs and wikis. In the early days of Lotus Quickplace users were upset when senior management and IT people wanted to make access to the Quickplace collaboration sites more open.

Now, companies are increasingly using blogs and wikis as collaboration sites because they provide the very transparency was a concern of the Quickplace users. Transparent social tools such as blogs and wikis open up even greater opportunities for social network analysis around content. A search engine that looks at these relationships, as well as the content, can further open up the enterprise and realize the opportunity with Enterprise 2.0.