If awareness is the ability for the observer to conscious of events, then one would welcome as much information as possible to be on top of his/her game. Unfortunately this task can be overwhelming with the massive volumes of information generated today, and this is why we too often depend on technology to tell us what we should know. We organize our information with taxonomies, libraries, processes, assisted workflow, search engine, alerts and complex analytics to guide our decisions and actions. These tools generally help us when we know what we are looking for; but what about the unexpected? Are we missing critical new developments because we did not anticipate it?
Companies that use SharePoint (or Lotus Connections, Jive, Newsgator, Traction, and other social software platforms) are generating massive volumes of user generated unstructured data. There are rich conversations that, if properly examined can reveal the pulse of the organization, the hot topics of conversations, the unexpected new events, ideas, and efforts. Most companies are not talking advantage of this rich data source to listen to the voice of the employee, as described by Forrester’s Leslie Owens. Most collaborative platforms do not provide the means to overcome this information overload to discover the patterns and trends of conversation with the enterprise.
Darwin Ecosystem provides an answer to this limitation and growing problem. Instead of looking at the computer to infer meaning, Darwin’s Awareness Engine™ displays information patterns and lets the user infer meaning by observing familiar themes and outliers. It goes beyond search to provide awareness. It let’s you more easily find the unexpected. Hundreds or thousands of recent events are dynamically correlated in real time to help the user understand what is happening without having to consume the content until the theme of interest has been selected. This provides rapid awareness while overcoming information overload without any deterministic algorithms, complex analytics or dependence of human/organizational networks.
I have covered the Awareness Engine a good bit on this blog so will not repeat the details again. Here is a description for those interested, Enabling Content Discovery – The Awareness Engine™. The Awareness Engine can easily be focused on content within the enterprise. At a SharePoint organization, you only need to stream your collaborative events into an RSS feed that the Darwin Awareness Engine with fetch constantly to prepare the content visualization shown above in real-time, These visualizations can then help any member of your organization gain awareness about what is going on generally, or according to a targeted topic of interest such as a product, project, client, competitor, etc. For more contact us at: [email protected].
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