gokubi.com

Cogmap is a weird new service, but is worth examining. It’s a public repository of org charts that are collaboratively created and maintained, much like a wiki. Google’s org chart is up there, and if you take a look at it you’ll see what you expect, a hierarchical set of boxes. It was created by cogmap in their initial load and has been modified by two other users since then. The staff have a first and last name, as well as a title. Some have phone numbers and email addresses. It’s a pretty interface, and there are 3 different ways to view the data, which is helpful.

But why should we care about collaboratively maintained org charts? People who are working for change in the world do so by engaging other people in bringing about that change. Sometimes they bring a lot of ordinary people together in a mass action. Other times they engage with a smaller set of people who are in charge of making decisions that affect large numbers of people. These decisions makers could be in government, or at the tops of large corporations. If you get those people on board, the can write laws or making business decisions that have huge impact. Leveraging those key decision makers (sometimes called the “inside game”) can often be the best way to use scarce resources to bring about change.

When I am working with my customers’ data, I have seen some intersting things. One thing I’ve noticed is that a few people show up in many or all of the databases. These folks are the key decision makers. They are the ones who if brought on board can have a lot of influence. But everyone has to maintain the basic information about these people by themselves. Key funders, politicians, business leaders, are all kept in these private rolodexes.

What Cogmap does is move this data into a collaborative space. The basic info for the top 25 people at Microsoft is now publicly kept and maintained. We can all use it, and keep it accurate. Heck, maybe even the companies listed will maintain their own folks.

It would then be technically possible to connect company and people records in your database to their public homologues in Cogmap. So that when you first start to work with Amzon.com or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, you could import the company and people into your database. And changes that were made on Cogmap could show up in your database where could choose to accept or reject those changes.

It’s a slightly different take on the problem than the Media Volunteer Center. They’ve got a database of media outlets and reporters and have an interface for volunteers to clean the data. If you make changes they have to go through a review process before they are visible. And I don’t believe there is an interface for creating new data.

So Cogmap is an interesting peek at the future of collaborative CRM database services. I’d like to know if they have any API plans. Things could get interesting if they go this route–org charts are great, but using Cogmap as a source for collaboratively maintained key decision maker data is a bit more interesting.

technorati tags: salesforce.com, cogmap, collaboration

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 25th, 2006 at 1:28 pm and is filed under CRM, Technology. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.