IGLOO Software announced a partnership with MicroStrategy, for the integration of MicroStrategy’s business intelligence tools into IGLOO’s social business suite:

“The solution will allow IGLOO customers to track user participation, influence, activity and engagement in a social intranet or extranet.

As social technologies are introduced to business, workflow and employee interactions become more and more visible. The resulting activity and dialogue produces unprecedented volumes of data around social behaviors and actions. The addition of an analytics module provides organizations with the ability to identify areas where social interactions are most effective and model those more broadly across the entire organization to improve the effectiveness of team collaboration.

….

IGLOO will integrate MicroStrategy’s BI platform into the IGLOO administrative console in order to enrich the community management and reporting process. A dashboard of indicators will be presented graphically, including activity, contribution types and top content.“

I hope this partnership works out for IGLOO, MicroStrategy, and their joint customers. I think there is good value to be gained by understanding what is going on inside technology designed to bring people together. And I look forward to the more advanced capabilities that could come about by having such capabilities available – mere counts and top content are useful as a starting place, but much more is needed.

In the technology chapter of Collaboration Roadmap, I present four frameworks for evaluating collaboration technology—a framework for collaborative teams, collaborative groups, and collaborative organizations, as well as a different approach called Collaboration Scenarios. What IGLOO and MicroStrategy are doing could fit very well into the initial three frameworks:
– for Collaborative Teams, Pillar 7 (collaboration auto-discovery)
– for Collaborative Groups, Connector 4 (surfacing of related groups and conversations)
– for Collaborative Organizations, Foundations 1 and 2 (identify expertise shown in collaborative systems, and correlate knowledge stored in collaborative systems, respectively).