SWOOP Product Vision and Roadmap

Since we started SWOOP in 2014 our missions has been “to help organisations and their staff become better collaborators”.  We have a focus on helping people improve how they interact with each other to get work done. To understand what underlies this vision and the principles that underpin our products, it’s worth indulging you in the history leading up to what SWOOP is today.  

Prior to starting SWOOP several of us had worked together in the field of Knowledge Management (KM), then followed by a Organisational Network Analysis consulting business, and now to SWOOP Analytics.  In the field of KM we speak of two types of knowledge:

• Explicit Knowledge i.e. knowledge that has been codified as information and; 
• Tacit Knowledge i.e. the non-codified knowledge that is implied in what people know and can only be shared through direct person to person contact. 

The 1990s created an explosion in information repositories in the form of document libraries, databases, websites and the like. The tacit knowledge path required people to connect and build the trusted relationships required to enable valuable tacit knowledge to flow. We chose to use the less known science of Social Network Analysis (SNA) to better understand how human networks functioned within organisations, as we strongly believe that information (explicit knowledge) is inherently worthless without the added human touch, i.e. information has a social life. We've therefore always been strongly focused on the tacit knowledge component, and this perspective fundamentally informs how we think about measurement. Let's explore that a bit more.

There are generally two substantially different ways in measuring how people interact. You can choose to focus on volume/traffic ('what' and 'how') or on relationships ('who'): 

Volume and Relationships measures are not an “either/or”; they complement each other. Volume reflect a resource level and utilisation, but on its own it is hard to interpret in business value terms. For example, is having high chat and calls usage better than having a high community and teams channel activity?  

Relationships reflect ‘knowledge in motion’ between people. Unless an organisation is made up of only independent individual contributors, knowledge flows are essential for generating business value. This is the hard bit to measure and is SWOOP's unique point of difference. SWOOP's core measures are humanistic. We are concerned with behaviours that leaded to superior collaboration outcomes; how they are measured and monitored. 

Product Roadmap

Product development is constantly happening on all three products, and here's a glimpse of the big things we're working on at the moment.

We operate with 2 planning cycles. One is on a 3-month basis where we plan out what we intend to deliver in the next quarter. Then we have a longer term evolving product roadmap which is more conceptual but helps us set the direction of where we are going.

If you would like to provide input to our roadmap we'd love to hear from you. Join one of our User Communities.