Business, Featured - Written Friday, August 13, 2010 by Naumi Haque - 0 Comments

A view of self through a digital mirror

Given the proliferation of digital information about ourselves and our online interactions (and the prospect of more to follow), I find it fascinating when companies put out tools that help reflect our digital personas and social graphs so that we may better understand them. I’ve written on Wikinomics before about SONAR from Trampoline Systems and MIT Personas. Recently I came across Digital Mirror from Cataphora—a company I’ve been following for some time and wrote a case study about last year. Cataphora began as a digital sleuthing company that did e-discovery in a legal, governance, risk management, and compliance context to reduce liability. In many cases, they would discover information from subpoenaed databases for trial purposes. They were digital spies.

Now, Cataphora is in the business of modeling “informal networks” within the enterprise for HR and operational efficiencies, as well as to monitor compliance with internal policies and external regulations. By analyzing the relationship between e-mail data, documents that are shared, calendar information, call logs, and people, Cataphora can assess employee productivity, uncover shadow networks, and map collaborative behavior. Digital Mirror offers some of these capabilities to the public for free by analyzing your archived data from Microsoft Outlook.

Continue…