SmallBlue is a social networking application that unlocks the valuable business intelligence of 'who knows what?', 'who knows whom?' and ‘who knows what about whom’ within an organization, without requiring explicit involvement of individuals.
The aim of SmallBlue is to locate knowledgeable colleagues, communities, and knowledge networks in companies. The suite also helps users manage their personal networks, and reach out to their extended network (the friends of their friends) to find and access expertise and information.
As a social network tool, SmallBlue is dependant on people contributing information. The more people who contribute, the better and more useful the tools will be. Unlike other social network tools SmallBlue has been designed to minimise the time burden on the practitioner, it automates contribution leaving you more time to use to the tools to help you collaborate.
SmallBlue is made up of a client and web application.
SmallBlue Client
This application is a client-side analysis application that is used to analyze the user's email and instant message transcripts to determine the social network and infer expertise.
SmallBlue Web Application
- The web application consists of the following 4 components:
- Find: Enables the user to search for people with a desired knowledge or skill within the organization. The search/results can be scoped to a specific line of business, country, and/or degrees of separation within your personal extended network.
- Reach: SmallBlue Reach is a social dashboard that provides a consolidated view of a person's information, enabling the searcher to validate a person's expertise and determine their accessibility. A Reach page includes a person's formal (or declared) expertise as defined within their corporate profile (e.g. BluePages), the communities to which they belong, as well as their recent public postings (i.e. blogs, forums, Dogear). In addition, the page also shows the recommended and alternate social paths for reaching the person.
- Net: SmallBlue Net is a large scale social network visualization and analysis tool. It displays the social network diagram for a given topic, keyword, or community, which can be used to find alternate experts as well as identify key influencers and brokers.
- Ego: SmallBlue Ego provides a visualization of a user's personal social network as well as the social capital of each contact. Social capital is defined as the number of new contact that a user can be introduced to through their direct contact - including the geographical and organizational distribution of these new contacts. This visualization is private and personalized for each user.
How does it work?
SmallBlue used two different types of information to work: social network information (who you know), and expertise information (what they know). Currently it utilizes the following data sources to derive this information:
-- employee's outgoing emails to other employees within the same company
-- outgoing SameTime 7.5 chats based on the saved transcripts
-- Profile information (i.e. BluePages)
-- Other public / private data sources can be added in the future to further enhance the robustness and breadth of SmallBlue.
SmallBlue applies artificial intelligence algorithms to infer a participants social network (who they know) and also the expertise of those people (what they know) based on outgoing communications. Currently SmallBlue uses saved outgoing, internal emails and SameTime 7.5 chats only (i.e. content you control). Emails and chat transcripts containing keywords such as "private" or "confidential" are excluded from this analysis process and the user can add additional stopwords as needed (e.g. "lawsuit").
This inferred social network is displayed as a visualization in Ego, which is private for each user. You can use this personal social network visualization to modify your network (i.e. add or remove relationships).
SmallBlue Find and Net work on the basis of contributing social network information into a wider aggregated pool, in which the information contributed is under the control of the individual participants. As described above, you can modify your social network using the tools in SmallBlue Ego, and as a result, these modified social networks (and the related expertise data) are aggregated and combined with other data sources (currently Bluepages) and used by the Find and Net engines.
These search engines enable users to search for expertise based on a topic and displays the results in the context of the wider enterprise social network.
It is important to note the relationships and expertise in a participant's personal social network are inferred abstractions and are not a direct representation of specific communications. Communication contacts and content are neither retrievable nor searchable by any individual in the system. SmallBlue Find and SmallBlue Net utilize a composite data source (derived from the combined social networks of all participants) and the social network connections in it cannot be attributed to any one person.