Today more than ever before, the essence of any organisation is driven and motivated by relationships between people within and outside of the organisation. These relationships can be used to elicit ‘soft information' when conducting market intelligence activities, as Vernon Prior said in his recent FUMSI articles: 'Organisations comprise many people (the ultimate sources of soft information), both inside and outside the company.' (http://web.fumsi.com/go/af/4156). This is nothing new, except when we map this into the context of the globalised connected information society that we are all part of today. It provides new avenues to elicit ‘soft information' and map it into a context that gives the ‘soft information' a hard value.
If we were to postulate on the role of the informal organization as opposed to the formal, the following quote from Price is apt: 'An organization is both a formal and informal entity. The formal aspect of an organization is its official structure and public image visible in organization charts and annual reports. The informal organization is a more elusive concept, describing the complex network of psychological and social relationships between its people. The informal organization is an unrecognized world of cliques and politics, friendships and enmities, gossip and affairs.'[i]
Hang on to this picture and map it into the concept of Web 2.0, taking a bottom up approach. Remember Web 1.0 is about mapping the physical world to the virtual world and Web 2.0 is about people[ii]. Hence it is an informal organisation that is driven by your employees, each constituting a jigsaw piece of the social capital of your organisation. Imagine a motivated knowledge workforce, driven by their own personal agenda; which is to get an online reputation and be heard in one or more of the small ponds in the large ocean of your organisation[iii].
But what happens if your organisation is not aware of this, is not part of this, and does not have an internal intelligence infrastructure to facilitate the capture and effective use of soft information being generated by your employees? What happens if your employees don't feel that they are being listened to or that their opinion counts?
Figure 1 Information flowdynamics matrix
The consequences could be that your organisation's soft (and maybe also hard) information flows transparently through the organisational boundaries. The information flow dynamics of an organisation could look a little like as is shown in Figure 1; the red arrows are information flow. What is in the red box is an interesting cocktail that is a mixture of rumour, suggestion, opinion, gossip, hints and speculation generated by the employee; that may or may not be true. Your employees, many of them subject matter experts in the masses, will instead congregate, group and link with other subject matter experts from other organisations in virtual spaces somewhere in cyberspace where they can be heard and where their opinion counts. Here they will build their online reputation by communicating, linking and collaborating outside of the confines of the organization. What's more, this is a great feeding hole for market intelligence personnel from other organisations.
If this is the case, it is probable that you have no way of knowing of who is linking with whom and you will not know what your employees are sharing. You may think that you do; after all you have an information security programme implemented to protect the organisation's IP and any hard/soft information generated by the organisation, as well as hard information generated by employees. You even have all employees sign to a code of business ethics (COBE). However what you are probably missing is the protection of soft information generated by the employee, based upon what they have gleaned given their role in the organisation, and what has been shared with them by the organisation; information that is absorbed, shaken up and blended with that person's subjective self.
Figure 2 Information leakage and influence by internal intelligence
Much soft information has no significant value by itself, but once linked with previously unlinked soft information they transform into nuggets of gold for persons/organisations mining for market intelligence, or for head-hunters digging for key influencers in targeted organisations. It may give them enough to ask the right questions with contact with the right person, altogether easier today with the public availability of professional networking tools that can assist them in building their knowledge map.
Indeed, to control employee soft information that is shared outside of the organisation's boundaries is next to impossible if you don't know what is being shared. What you can do is empower the employee to share within the organisation in a way that makes them feel that they count, that the organisation listens to them, and you can also have an infrastructure in place that enables you to understand better your informal organisation. This information can be used for internal business intelligence as a feedback loop as shown in Figure 2.
This does not enable you to protect the privacy of organisational data that seeps through unofficial channels, but it will at least give you an idea of what soft information is being shared, who is talking to whom, who the key influencers of opinion in your organisation are. It may enable you to be proactive in influencing how hard/soft information is interpreted by the employee before it is leaked outside of the organisation's physical/logical boundaries.
Just expand this concept. Information could also be flowing into your organisation via informal channels. Your employees could be the receivers. If leveraged correctly they provide additional sources for market intelligence for what's going on outside of the organisation. Information that they have gleaned and interpreted and has become a part of the employee's soft information. Add this to hard information gained from projects and work done on customer sites, results in a lot of market intelligence that should be flowing back into the soft/hard information of the organisation.
Figure 3 Empowerment of the employee journey
Take a look at Figure 3, 'Empowerment of the employee journey'. If you were to map your organisation onto this journey, it probably has newsgroups and forums, there are virtual rooms for learning, email, chat and maybe even an internal ‘blogging' space. Notice that your ability to influence the content of employees' soft capital should increase naturally by providing the organisation's employees with participative tools. Internal business intelligence can benefit by leveraging special tools that log factors such as activity, linking, new groups, forum activity, blogs most visited, knowledge capital uploaded, downloaded, etc., to provide a picture of the informal organisation.
How does this work in practice? Before we get to the soft information, you should consider implementing a technology that can help you to control the proliferation of hard information scattered throughout your organisation. This might be confidential information, or segments of intellectual property (IP) cut and paste into documents or emails that have become a part of the employees' hard information. One such product uses document fingerprinting techniques, and using this blueprint, scans the organisation's information infrastructure for fragments. You could start by asking Symantec about their DLP (data loss/leakage prevention) products.
Next, you need to have a social networking infrastructure implemented in your organisation, and there are loads of products out there doing this. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 has features such as knowledge management, wikis, discussion forums, surveys, contacts, links, etc. Moreover, if we were to build upon this with business intelligence tools, there is at least one product from OISoftware that enables you to build a picture of your informal organisation. This product includes a ‘reputation spider' that provides the ability to measure the worth of social capital that an individual employee is worth to the organisation, i.e. who are your main influencers of opinion and rumour?
The tools are out there., It is just a matter of understanding how best to leverage them within your organisation. Management needs to appreciate the power of surfacing the informal organisation not to control but to leverage its organic nature, a key strength in the chaotic, connected world that we are operating in today. Business intelligence should not be focused purely upon what's going on outside of your organisation, much of which is outside of your control, but upon what is happening inside of the organisation's own walls.
[i] Price, A (2004) Organizational culture. In: Human Resource Management in a Business Context, 2nd ed. Thomson Learning, Chapter 9.
[ii] Lawrence Öqvist, K. (2009), Virtual Shadows: Your Privacy in the Information Society, ISBN 978-1-906124-09-0, British Computer Society
[iii] Lawrence Öqvist, K. (2009), Talk Differently. BCS IT Now, May 2009.
During the past 20 years Karen Lawrence Öqvist's experience in IT and information security has spanned diverse verticals and many countries. Today she works with Hewlett-Packard as a senior security architect as well as program manager for HP's Information Security Service Management (ISSM).
She has a Masters Degree in Information Security from the Royal Holloway University of London and is studying for an MBA with Henley Management School, University of Reading.
Karen is a published author on the subject of identity, privacy and information sharing and hosts a blog at ww.virtualshadows.com. Her book "Virtual Shadows" was published by the British Informatics Society (BCS) in January 2009. She is a frequent speaker at conferences in Europe both on the subject of identity and privacy, and information security management.
The FreePint Family is a family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success.
'FreePint... provides most of my professional development because it won't come through work and [other resources] just don't cut it.'
FUMSI Forum: Do you have a research question? Post it to the FUMSI Forum, where professionals share Q&A and useful tips on how to Find, Use, Manage and Share Information. It's free.
![[Reuse options]](http://license.icopyright.net/images/icopy-w.png){kind=small}
Today more than ever before, the essence of any organisation is driven and motivated by relationships between people within and outside of the organisation. These relationships can be used to elicit ‘soft information' when conducting market intelligence activities, as Vernon Prior said in his recent FUMSI articles: 'Organisations comprise many people (the ultimate sources of soft information), both inside and outside the company.' (
FreePint Shop:
VIP LiveWire:
