I just read about SAP internalising social networking for business which references Cogenz. It got me thinking about an important debate and question that we’re asked over and over again: Is Cogenz ignoring the social networking aspects of enterprise bookmarking?Â
When we presented at Under the Radar, we introduced Cogenz as del.icio.us for the Enterprise. A “peer” of ours in the same space, Connectbeam (who presented directly after us), introduced themselves as del.icio.us and Linkedin for the enterprise.
No prizes for understanding that an implicit social network is built in the ordinary course of users’ bookmarking behaviour (built by commonality of tags and users). So, it seems obvious to build a social network on top of this data… it’s all part of turning the data into intelligence for the Enterprise and for the users.
There are two reasons why Cogenz has decided to keep things simple and focus on bookmarking without an obvious social networking layer:

1. Don’t change users’ existing behaviour
   The key to generating the intelligence that bookmarking can bring to the Enterprise is to ensure that your Enterprise adopts the bookmarking tool quickly and easily: otherwise building and analysing a social network is academic. No data in = no information/value out. So the crux of all of this is making sure you don’t ask users to change the way in which they currently work. People bookmark everyday, if they don’t do it in del.icio.us they do it in their browsers, so asking them to bookmark in Cogenz isn’t asking a lot of them. The fact that they will be able to pinpoint colleagues in different geographies and practice areas bookmarking similar material and allow them to navigate around bookmarks and users will sell Cogenz to them in one easy pass. (Incidentally: Cogenz allows a dual posting to a user’s del.icio.us profile, what could be easier? We also allow new Cogenz users to import their del.icio.us tags if they want to)
2. Don’t compete with existing systems, compliment them.
   The academic argument that it would be “nice” to have social networking tools (like user profiles and contact details etc) integrated into an Enterprise bookmarking system is ignoring a real implementation barrier: you are asking an Enterprise to either a) create yet another system keeping track of their people or otherwise b) asking them to throw away their investment in their intranet or similar system in favour of something new. Is this a shortcut to implementing such a ground breaking tool?

Hopefully, you now understand our thinking. We’ve tried to keep Enterprise bookmarking simple: simple (and useful) to use and simple to implement. There are many existing and powerful analysis tools to help you understand the social network that exists behind your Enterprise’s knowledge. We are playing around with many of them and will share our findings soon but in the meantime, get gathering the data and enjoy the value in sharing and collaborating with your colleagues.