Software to Watch over Me

What if you could mine your employees' e-mail for useful information? You can, thanks to Tacit Knowledge Systems. But will visions of Big Brother watching over workers' shoulders outweigh any potential benefits?

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Anatomy

David Gilmour's start-up is based on the provocative idea that companies should mine their employees' E-mail for business information

Let's say you want some inside information on a big potential customer. Maybe one of your employees has a buddy who works there. But how do you discover that useful connection? Finding out exactly who in your organization knows what -- whether it is people, places, technology, or product information -- is a maddeningly imperfect process. Simplifying that process is what Tacit Knowledge Systems, a Silicon Valley start-up, is all about.

Tacit's software primarily uses an employee's E-mail messages to build a profile of all the subjects that the employee knows about so that his or her coworkers can leverage that information better. "The first place a new idea shows up is in a private message from one person to another," Tacit CEO David Gilmour explains. "The question is, Can you pop open the lid on that treasure chest and use what's in the mail?" Gilmour sees Tacit's software as the crowbar companies can use to remove that lid.

The software -- sold under the name KnowledgeMail -- tracks the words and phrases that employees use in their E-mail correspondence, as well as in the documents in their personal directories. Using a password-protected Web site, staffers of a Tacit client can search for people who have used specific terms in their messages and documents, just as they would do a search at Web sites like Yahoo or Google. But instead of receiving a list of Web-page matches, employees receive a list of the names of coworkers who have used the specified search terms.

Gilmour believes that KnowledgeMail will help companies find critical business information more quickly and inexpensively than ever before. He also believes it will compel them to reward smart, well-informed employees for sharing information with their coworkers. "When there's a question within an organization, our system gives employees a chance to raise their hands," he explains.

Perhaps. But what about the fear factor? The idea of having their E-mail musings cataloged automatically may be enough to send workers into an Orwellian panic. And make no mistake: workers do worry about Big Brotherism in corporate America. "I think privacy has become the #1 civil-rights issue of the information age," says Dave Steer, spokesman for TRUSTe, a nonprofit that tracks how technology affects privacy concerns. "Any effort by a company to collect information about people -- without disclosing what's being done with that information -- will fail."

Gilmour couldn't agree more. In fact, the Tacit CEO argues that his product actually enhances employees' privacy within a company, even as it sorts through their E-mail. An employee's profile is private until he or she decides which pieces of it to make public. The software ensures that privacy by giving employees the power to add terms to their individual profiles, in effect giving them veto power over the system.

"Privacy is the means we use to draw users into the system," Gilmour explains. "The profiles are visible only to that particular employee. At the technical level, customers are not allowed to tamper with their employees' profiles."

But even if workers choose to keep private all the terms derived from their hard drives, they're still drawn into the system. If you know a lot about Java programming, for example, but you don't include that on your public profile, the system will still E-mail you when a coworker searches for Java experts. The searcher doesn't know you're out there, but you'll know your coworker is in need -- so maybe you'll volunteer to help.

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