Here is a cross post from the Fast Forward blog. It describes a new tool that shows how web 2.0 or enterprise 2.0 can expand the bundaries of traditional applications. I recently spoke with David Gilmour, CEO at Tacit, about their new web 2.0 tool. illumio. I have known about Tacit for some time because of their ActiveNet™ application that works inside the firewall to enable connections within an enterprise. It proposes new connections between employees in response to a request created by an employee facing a particular work situation. It is frequently used as an expert locator. An important part of the tool is the opt-in feature. It is up to the employees receiving requests whether they accept the proposed connections or allow their profile to be public within the enterprise. If they decide not to accept, the sender does not know this, maintaining privacy for the receiver of requests.
When Tacit decided to move into the web 2.0 space, they wanted provide a tool that addresses individual employee issues and they wanted to make use of their opt-in capabilities. The result was illumio. It works with same goal as Active Net, automating the process of finding relevant information and people behind the scenes. This time it starts with the individual and the individual’s own computer activity as its core. To determine your current concerns it indexes such sources as your sent mail folder, your documents, and your web browsing. You can adjust these indexing sources.
To help you better filter the RSS feeds you receive, illumio uses the profile of current concerns it developed. The illumio client downloads your selected RSS feeds, visits the underlying pages and extracts keyword phrases to determine whether each feed’s content is a good match for current concerns. In this way, filtered information is delivered directly to your desktop, allowing you to view only those articles that match your preferences and interests. You can then let illumio know its accuracy of it’s rating to provide feedback and further refine future suggestions. In this way illumio acts like a smart RSS reader.
There are also illumio groups. These are communities around a similar topic or affinity. By joining an illumio group, you get the group’s RSS feeds and you can participate in the group discussions or respond to requests for help. Here is where the opt-in privacy feature comes into play. When you send out a question or request for help, illumio picks the most relevant person to respond based on their current activity. This is all done behind the scenes in an automated mode. The most relevant person is asked first. If they say no, the requester never knows this, protecting the privacy of the person asked. The request is then automatically sent to the next best match while also protecting the privacy of the sender until someone responds. This avoids broadcast help requests that can overload email inboxes and result in multiple, often redundant, replies.
There are public and private illumio groups. One of the public ones is the Knowledge Management group. It is a “place where you can get interesting KM news and commentary (that illumio automatically matches to your interests) and connect with other KM professionals through the illumio Q&A exchange.”
There is one other feature that I think will work well in enterprise 2.0. You can specify documents on your hard drive that are accessible to the illumio search spiders. One of the problems with traditional knowledge management was getting people to put information in commonly accessed places. Now you can make your documents accessible without having to upload them anywhere. You just mark them as open to illumio. There is additional control over this openness as you can indicate the groups that can find each document.
They have recently launched a Facebook application that allows you to have comments on articles or other content from illumio appear in your Facebook profile. The idea is to find articles that match your interests and expertise, allow you to easily comment on them, have your comments distributed to your Facebook friends (via the mini-feed) and show up on your profile page. This allows your profile page to be more interesting for visitors. They can easily find good stuff you’ve commented and see your commentary.
The concept behind illumio is to provide you with more useful information, let you be in control of who contacts you or what information you receive, and put no requirements on you other than turning on the application or marking documents. I think that illumio provides a nice combination of features that, for one thing, go beyond traditional RSS readers for monitoring feeds and, for another, go beyond traditional email communities.
It is an excellent example of the type of new tools that can come out of enterprise 2.0 as illumio integrates automated content aggregation, expertise discovery, social network discovery, and the smart facilitation of collaboration. I also like the privacy feature of smart questioning so you do not feel on the spot to respond, ignore, or reject someone’s request.
There is an illumio Team Blog to get updates on the application.
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