Adding relationship capital to CRM...

Relationship capital is the term that Tom Baldwin actually uses in his latest posting:

"If you're firm is serious about leveraging its relationship capital, these tools shouldn't be overlooked."

The tools he is blogging about are Contact Networks and Branch-IT, both designed to get data in automatically and beyond what people usually needed to be forced to enter into a CRM. Tom sees two advantages in what he considers a "supplement" for or a "nice compliment" to CRM:

First, because they mine your firm's e-mail server and create individual contact records from e-mail your lawyers send and receive (filtering out spam and other junk mail) there's absolutely ZERO data entry required by lawyers or their secretaries...

These systems ... offer various access levels to contact information, which can provide lawyers a much greater level of control over the use of their contacts than in a traditional CRM system.

The second part kind of helped me overcome my initial doubts over the legal situation created by these systems. But then I am not a lawyer, so my doubts on legal issues are not exactly relevant. How would these systems be received ? I guess people are entitled to know about that. Would they agree ?

I wonder though what peer or career pressure would add to that. Anyways, as previously mentioned, Xpertfinder by Fraunhofer promised automation of expert discovery via emails and documents a couple of years ago. Maybe they were just around too early when intellectual capital was still a very shallow term for a lot of people and even less people had come to terms with relationship capital. Welcome to 2006, where this has changed.

What struck me on the website of Branch-IT was one sentence on the start page:

Recruiting: Find strong job candidates with the help of your employees. Cut out the recruiting middleman. Find objective references.

That sounds kind of familiar. Ask your buddies to work for the same firm you work for. Always a perfect match provided they (the firm and the buddies) think highly of you. But automate that? Would I like to take questions over friends of mine if they happen to apply for a job somehwere in a large organisation? Provide references, yes. Talk informally with my boss, yes. Take potentially personal questions about them, no. Talk to some HR manager from another office, yes, provided I know, trust and like the HR manager, otherwise, no.

I am unsure if people would accept this kind of knowledge being captured and used, but then again, Tom Baldwin seems to have a good perception for up- and coming software.

And in some cases automatically captured data may even do less damage than manually entered, subjective and potentially damaging data.