As companies grow larger and more geographically dispersed, it becomes incresingly difficult to find the right people within the organization. Who are the experts? Who has experience dealing with certain problems? Who is passionate about a given subject? These are questions that HR departments are struggling to respond, yet the opportunity is there, resting on the shoulders of two recent trends.
First, you have increasing levels of enterprise technological sophistication. Most of the processes are now completely electronic which means that the majority of the company’s activity leaves some sort of trace that can be easily detected, analyzed and acted upon. Even a face-to-face meeting can be captured because it was probably previously scheduled in MS Exchange or Google Calendar.
Second, cloud-based enterprise applications are effectively democratizing access to all sorts of productivity tools inside the company. Any employee can now try (or even buy using his personal credit card) dozens of applications that help him do a better job without having to ask permission to the IT department or his manager. This is actually how tools like yammer or hipchat have been entering big companies without resorting to the traditional slow sales cycle that characterizes this market. So, even if the officially sanctioned tools may not capture all the activity going on in the company, there’s a high chance that randomly installed cloud-based applications may be already filling the gaps.
In summary, there are tons of work-related highly-relevant information already being registered today, producing authentic work logs for each worker. And what’s more insightful than a work log to know what are the real interests and skills of someone? So, while HR departments may be struggling to solve the experts’ discovery problem the fact is that the information is probably already there – they just need the tools to analyze it and make sense of all that data.
Additionally, this kind of work log information is a great complement to existing manager or peer reviews, which is what many organization have been focusing on right now. However, that’s not enough! Sameer Patel argues that there are four dimensions to a meaningful employee system of record and that the real value of ‘me’ (as an employee) is a combination of these dimensions, as you can see from this figure.
This is a great vision and we like to think we’re managing the second and fourth dimension with Spreadd, in a very simple way:
2 – What I think I’m good at and who I connect with – Since Spreadd is observing and analyzing everything you do, we can actually tell what you’re good at instead of telling what you think you’re good at.
4 – What others think I’m good at – Spreadd has its own commenting/rating system on top of the activities it captures (e.g., you can comment on a file someone dropped into a shared folder) but it is also able to understand the social mechanisms that are already in place in the tools it integrates with (e.g., a comment in the internal wiki). Moreover, it uses that information to drive its relevance engine in two ways. In one hand, it understands that if you comment on certain activities a lot, then future similar activities are probably relevant to you. On the other hand, if your activities receive a lot of comments, than that says something about yourself as well.
So, by riding the wave of the sophistication and democratization trends, Spreadd is able to provide the missing pieces to support efficient collaboration. Concluding with words from Sameer Patel:
(…) the first step to efficient collaboration needs to focus on “people insight” and comprehensive identity.
That, then, opens the door to efficient resourcing, then better co-creation and problem solving, and ultimately, business performance. Get identity wrong, and you’ve handicapped your odds of success, no matter how shiny your social tools or how big your budget.