Trampoline Systems: Responding to the dysfunctional nature of corporate systems

Following the money-- investments in technologies that are and will increasingly impact organizations (like Cisco's recent acquisitions), -- via Jerry Bowles Enterprise 2.0 micropublication an interesting note reporting an E 2.0 Breakthrough in Europe: Trampoline Systems has raised $5.8 million.

Thanks Nat Welch for alerting me to Trampoline, (until now best known for their Enron Explorer).  Reading Jerry Bowles October 2006 Trampoline Systems Profile: Social Lessons from Enron and Agnes intriguing to see Trampoline's roots lie in co-founder and chief executive Charles Armstrong's, (an ethnographer) 1999 frustration with the  "'dysfunctional nature of corporate systems". His response: retreating to a 72 inhabitant Scilly Isle to figure "how people naturally organize and communicate in an environment without access to the technology and tools of modern communications".  Trampoline Systems, "enterprise software that harnesses social behaviour" is the result.

Having revisited John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid's "The Social Life Information" in search of their way forward paradoxically is to "look around" quote I'm struck by the comparison to Julian Orr, an anthropologist studying how Xerox technicians really worked collaboratively (page 99) and the technologies that flowed from Xerox PARC efforts to support them.  Readers can correct me but from hearing John Seely Brown present I believe both Nextel and PlaceWare, the collaborative tool Microsoft purchased to create,"Windows Live" have their roots in Xerox PARC.

Richard Cross lists the 6 principles underlying Trampoline in a report from O'Reilly's Emerging Technologies Conference March 2006 where Trampoline founder Charles Armstrong spoke:

• The requirement to understand useful social mechanisms in the enterprise

• The nature of implicit authorization parameters within groups or communities


• How Groups pool intelligence on relay targets


• How Groups can function as targets for relaying


• How Relaying is activated by semantic triggers


• The notion of trigger thresholds governed by social network and the need to access activity, content and user preference data from across the whole corporate ecosystem

A thought provoking list in light of recent discussions here about implementing Enterprise 2.0.

~ Jenny Ambrozek