IT-Social

IT-Social takes social intelligence that already exists in a company's email system and adds it to their enterprise social network such as Jive®, VMware's SocialCast®, or Chatter from Salesforce.com®. IT-Social provides the following two important benefits for enterprise social networks:

  1. Increased Adoption Rates: Low adoption rates, also known as the "cold start" problem, can destroy the success of a corporate social network. IT-Social does this by recommending connections, groups, and topics of discussion the first time each and every employee logs in to the system. The net result is a more compelling and relevant social network from Day 1.
  2. Increased Community Engagement: Getting employees to interact with others and upload content to a community-driven site on an on-going basis may sound easy, but engagement doesn't happen automatically. IT-Social drives community engagement by recommending connections, groups, and topics of discussion over time to raise the levels of interactivity and community engagement.

How IT-Social Works

Delivered as a service, IT-Social takes a company's current social network – namely their email system – as input. Using machine leaning algorithms that marry social network analysis to text analytics, IT-Social analyzes the information to extract relationships and topics of conversation. IT-Social "understands" who is talking to whom, about what, and when – all at the same time. This information is then extracted and imported into the corporate social network. None of the information within the corporate email system is retained so there are no privacy issues.

Grounded in Social Network Analysis

The technology employed in IT-Social is grounded in social network analysis (SNA) because we believe enterprises are becoming increasing social and SNA is critically important to extracting usable business intelligence from the systems enterprises use to communicate. Further, we believe that not only knowing who are connected, but why they are connected (i.e., the context of relationships that provide the relational tie) can provide a level of intelligence not available before.

Built for Enterprise Scale

Since over 80% of an enterprise's information is unstructured content (in the form of email and hundreds of different types of documents) IT-Social was built to be highly scalable. Using technologies such as Hadoop and Solr allows IT-Social to scale to the level that enterprises require.