Discovering the value of `organisational relationships` through social network analysis

Johannesburg, 23 May 2006

Knowledge Focus offers MetaSight, a Social Network Analysis (SNA) enterprise tool from Morphix (UK).

With the deployment of portals, intranets, document management systems and databases, e-mail will still remain a primary business communication and knowledge sharing tool in organisations. MetaSight uniquely tracks emerging organisational concepts and relationships by automatically analysing e-mail subject titles and traffic patterns.

Two complementary tools are available, Communities of Interest and Communities of Relationships. These Web applications allow searches to be made for colleagues with particular interests or external relationships. The tools work by automatically profiling contact information and relationships of every individual in an enterprise from routine e-mail communications.

The Social Network Analysis application is packaged as a software product.

The MetaSight SNA tools include:
1. MetaSight Communities of Interest
A Web application which automatically profiles enterprise contact information and activity from e-mail addresses and subject titles. Interest profiles and communities are dynamically updated each day.

2. MetaSight Communities of Relationships
A Web application which automatically profiles external enterprise business relationships by analysing inbound and outbound e-mail communications. Relationship profiles and communities are dynamically updated each day.

Says Mark Newman, CEO of Morphix: "We are very excited about the ongoing development of MetaSight, which is founded on more than a eight years of research and development into e-mail communications within large organisations. Our latest developments continue to draw on our research findings and makes them available as leading-edge software products which can be implemented across a large organisation in less than a day."

In one deployment of Communities of Interest and Relationships an ability was created for a company to rapidly locate expertise, knowledge and business relationships across 3 500 consultants based in the UK, Continental Europe, Scandinavia, North America, Australia, Hong Kong, Africa and Malaysia. This single-server MetaSight installation took just one day to setup and test. Each day the system processed information from around 100 000 e-mails collected from 55 globally distributed servers, and dynamically maintained a taxonomy from which expertise and relationships are automatically profiled. Private, personal and confidential e-mails were automatically excluded.

Piet Dempsey, managing director of Knowledge Focus, says: "Knowing who knows what, or who knows who, is very difficult in large, globally distributed organisations. This application will allow organisations to identify the people that manage the relations inside and outside the organisation. We are keen to work with Morphix and tap into their experience to offer these products in the southern African and African market."

Knowledge Focus

Established in August 2000, Pretoria-based Knowledge Focus specialises in digital asset management and markets a range of products to help customers manage their information assets. The company supports and serves organisations that need to retrieve information quickly and accurately, and focuses specifically on the retrieval and preservation sectors. Knowledge Focus has extensive experience in the competitive intelligence and strategic marketing intelligence markets, and is a master reseller for a number of exciting technologies that enable these business functionalities.

These include media asset management (MAM) solutions for the broadcast and entertainment industry, as well as RetrievalWare from US-based company Convera.

RetrievalWare is a knowledge discovery platform that combines proven enterprise search and categorisation capabilities with dynamic classification methodology to help organisations automate knowledge management and discovery processes. The solution maximises return on investment in vast stores of unstructured information by providing highly scalable, fast, accurate and secure search across more than 200 forms of text.

Morphix

The Morphix Company was founded by Mark Newman in 1995 to provide services and products to improve organisational performance. It has worked closely with a number of blue chip companies in the development of enterprise architecture, process and knowledge management solutions.

The company develops and owns MetaSight, a software tool that provides a practical solution to expertise location and external relationship management. It is based on more that eight years of research and development. Clients currently include pharmaceutical, professional services, government, manufacturing and energy companies.

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