Darwin Brings Awareness Engine to Enterprise 2.0

  

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The introduction of Web 2.0 social media into the enterprise creates large amounts of potentially useful information about the social side of business processes. The key is gaining awareness and access to this social intelligence. Paula Thronton recent covers this issue nicely in The Context of “Intent.” She opens with, “Two differentiating attributes of 2.0 are adaptation and emergence. Adaptive systems rely on feedback loops for continuous assessment. Emergence is the result of self-organizing adaptation.”  

Paula later adds, “The goal is to bring together relevant facts to inform discovery (the possibilities) that then lead to design — especially adaptive design to support individuals interacting with or on behalf of a business. Such facts are often difficult to find and difficult to effectively interpret and leverage.” And then offers, “A more 2.0 approach would bring the facts into the context they’re related to, featuring (draw attention to via teasers) certain findings in tidbits, leading to more detail.” 

We think that enterprise 2.0 provides a wealth of social “data” as a byproduct of its use. Companies are only beginning to figure out how to harvest this content. The organizations that do this are truly working in the enterprise 2.0 space. Increasing awareness in context and finding related content is the goal of Darwin Ecosystem. Its awareness engine gives users the ability to perceive and be conscious of events and patterns of activities captured in the enterprise and Web 2.0. The introduction of Web 2.0 tools into the enterprise also opens up possibilities for even more information silos if these tools do not connect. Darwin provides a way to see emerging patterns of related content across information generated through a variety of tools.

Darwin reduces the effort of keeping-up with enterprise 2.0 content (Information Overload Management). It classifies and correlates patterns of the business activities trapped in your Web. Through its Scan Cloud™ Darwin makes visible and measurable the value of the enterprise 2.0 content (Awareness and Monitoring). You can see related items in a tag cloud like visualization and this relationship shifts as you move through the cloud. This dynamic nature makes it easy for users to see the correlation across the enterprise 2.0 content (Discovering and Sharing).

Using correlationmetrics based on Chaos Theory, Darwin looks for the emergence of correlated themes within chaotic content. This moves Darwin away from the voting and popularity rankings used by many information aggregators and search engines to rank information. By using correlation metrics, it does not require a known process or taxonomy to discover useful and related information. Darwin allows for the emergence that Paula discussed. You can set up ongoing filters or “attractors” to explore emerging themes in specific topics of interest or simply look at the broad picture. 

Darwin is a not a replacement of existing enterprise 2.0 technologies, dashboards, and document management tools. It is designed to complement and leverage these technologies by making their tacit knowledge more visible. Darwin looks at events, blogs and other Web 2.0 sources that may correlate with the enterprise actions, its competitors and the voice of its critics and customers. This allows the enterprise to be capable of more easily discovering its own knowledge assets as well as its market and competitive positioning.

Darwin’s Awareness Engine, a program manager in Marketing becomes aware of concerns in R&D, Sales or other initiatives that are emerging as he/she tries to promote a product (all without having to wait and depend the next meeting or coffee break encounter).  They can also see competitive moves that may correlate with their own plans or the efforts of their customers and prospects. Likewise management can have a high-level view of what topics are emerging across all divisions and initiatives to better steer the business or measure the effectiveness of the vision’s execution, in the process discovering emerging and stronger initiatives or employees that are noteworthy. 

It is a Web browser application (Scan Cloud™) or it can become a custom solution through API access. It is delivered through a Web server with services and a database correlating the different Web 2.0 sources. For the enterprise there is an on-premise solution running on Ruby on Rails and making use of RSS feeds. Its Virtual Cortex™ database can be set on Oracle, MS-SQL or mySQL according to scalability needs. You can go from inside out so an enterprise can correlate their initiatives, knowledge and business intelligence against the pulse of the Web. The application is currently in Alpha stage and available for use.

For example, we set up a query or “magnet” on technology during the Twitter downtime and discovered a series on interrelated articles on what was happening. A quick look at the Scan Cloud indicated that the two top terms correlated with Twitter at the moment were “service” and “site.” In the screen shot below service and site are shown in brighter yellow than the other related topics. You also see an image of the Twitter image that was picked up. We could also drill down to see the top content sources and articles on the topic. It can be hard to tear away from queries but we when on to explore other topics. 
Next we looked at knowledge management. We found a job for a knowledge e management specialist as shown below. When we clicked on the highlighted link, the job posting was found in the right column. There was also coverage of a knowledge management event in Nigeria, another long tail discovery. Warning, it can addictive.

In 2008 Darwin won a Young Entrepreneurs Award from the Office for Science and Technology of the French Embassy in the United States. The Young Entrepreneurs Initiative (YEi) is a platform for mentoring and networking. US-based entrepreneurs who understand the importance of internationalizing their vision and their activity, and who wish to set up a technology venture in France.

We recently started this Darwin Discovery Engine Blog to provide more background on our efforts, as well as commentary on enterprise 2.0.