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This new blog is a place to collect thoughts and references about the sociometry of entreprise collaboration.

The starting point is the belief, shared by most, that the 21^st century enterprise is defined by the collaborative processes that it hosts. The efficiency of collaboration is, therefore, the most crucial challenge for most companies. Obviously, not all companies, there are still 20^th century tasks that need to be carried out. But "knowledge workers" who deliver services in a digital economy are clearly within this perimeter. The domain of this blog is the sociometry of this collaboration, that is, how it can be measured. Sociometry is a direct reference to the pioneering work of J.-L. Moreno.

The field of enterprise collaboration is undergoing a revolution because of electronic tools and the advent of IP networks which unify the three basic tasks of the knowledge worker: to search & process information, to communicate & produce new information, and to publish & share. This world of "collaboration over IP" is storming over companies, especially with the arrival of "digital natives" who are importing these collaboration patterns from their own private experience (at home).

Sociometry is needed because the only progress path is of continuous improvement. This is a more personal (and more arguable) statement: enterprise collaboration with modern technology is a difficult topic. I will return to this issue with future posts. Enterprise collaboration is interesting because this electronic revolution comes with its own problems. These are hard problems, which needs to be tackled with continuous improvements. Because human interaction and collaboration is so central to who we are, it is a difficult subject to discuss or study without passion or subjectivity.

Sociometry makes sense because a lot of relevant quantitative science is available. Today I will point out three relevant disciplines, but I am sure that there are others.

• CMC (computer mediated communication) – This subfield from psychology and sociology studies the way we may communicate using electronic tools. This is obviously enormously relevant. For instance, see what we know about reading/writing/typing speeds.
  
• Social Networks – The science of social networks has grown tremendously over the past 10 years. It brings researchers from diverse backgrounds, such as theoretical physics, sociology, biology or graph theory.
  
• Operations Research. – There are multiple ways in which OR is relevant to collaboration sociometry. The study of flows in network is an obvious example. But a much more important insight is that communicating takes time, hence the management of collaboration (and related information flows) is deeply related to time management. Insights from scheduling are especially relevant. My own background (I am an OR scientist and a member of ROADEF) makes me especially attuned to the time management dimension, but anyone who works in a modern company will understand the crucial importance of shared schedules.
  

These three are those that I have taken a deep interest in. The English version of my book should be available in a few months. I'll use this blog to make some of the relevant pages available online.

There are many kinds of blogs. Some blogs offer long and rich messages, some others are filled with short references to other places of interest on the Web. This is a blog of the second kind: I already author a blog of the first kind. Here my goal is three-folds:

• Collect pointers to existing resources on the web. This is the main goal, as there exists a wealth of relevant literature. I will only focus on resources that are related to collaboration, in the enterprise context (and especially anything that is related to business process execution) and that focus on the qualitative approach using metrics. This is already a very broad field (as defined by the intersection of these three constraints), focusing on two only would requires hundreds of people J
  
• Gather feedback, comments and suggestions from others who share this interest. Somehow, I have started to do this with my earlier blog, but writing in French limits the audience J
  
• Maintain an English version of some of my own work (cf. my research agenda). I will do this progressively, as I translate some of my work into scientific papers. For instance, this is what I am doing currently with my work on social networks.
  

Don't hesitate to leave comments or to email me directly if you know someone or something that is worth being mentioned. For instance, a very relevant Web site is Next Modernity.