Do You Really Want to Know About My Cousin Vinny?

 

Are you worth more to your company because of what you know, or who you know?

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article--"Six Degrees of Exploitation," August 4, 2003--several companies are frantically developing software to help employers (yours?) mine their employees' acquaintances for new business prospects.

Talk about Big Brother watching. You thought it was bad when your employer started monitoring the websites you visited on company time, or searched the files on your hard drive. With these new software applications, they will be able to scan your computerized address books, instant message buddy lists, electronic calendars and, of course, your e-mail correspondence, and then make maps of all the relationships they find among all employees and their contacts.

The goal is to identify those employees who have potentially useful contacts and could, for example, make a personal introduction between a salesperson and a prospective new customer or client.

One company, Visible Path, says its "Relationship Capital Management platform uses social network analysis to locate, leverage and create relationship capital across the enterprise." Its "Relationship Management Engine" is even supposed to be able to evaluate how strong a link is between and employee and a contact by, for example, taking into consideration …

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