I recently spoke with Bob Lancaster, CEO and founder of Infusion Logic that is introducing a new product called calc{list}™. On one level calc{list}™ is described as doing for contacts and lists what spreadsheets did for numbers, hence the name. It lives up to this billing but it goes beyond that to engage the enterprise in maintaining these lists with a lot of what Bob calls, “passive automation” that enlists enterprise 2.0 features. In a way it is like a del.icio.us for lists. I will get to that in a minute.

Traditional contact tools are like the phone book with lookup, sorting and contact maintenance features. Many CRM tools work this way also with the addition of a lot of unique data entry in most of them. With calc{list}™ lists are themselves the topic, action, category, group, task, tag or stage that contacts are currently a member of. These lists are created by individual users and can be maintained either by the user or collaboratively by sharing the lists with others. Shared lists can be combined to generate new lists or linked to automate updates to lists. Hence, an individual that changes their list may be effectively updating many other users lists, potentially without even being aware of their contribution. This is the foundation of “passive automation”. The result is a de-centralized emergent knowledge management/automation tool. Calc{list}s transparency allows for everyone to benefit from the work of everyone else. Sound familiar?

This is a simple concept but many good ideas are just that, complex things made simpler. Now here is the del.icio.us part. When you generate a list for a task like steps in a sales process, you name it. You are building a taxonomy (or since it is bottom up, a folksonomy) of tasks like who needs a new computer or who just bought your product. You can see who in the organization have similar lists labeled the same way. However, this can be over-ridden when a common taxonomy is in order. For example, if sales managers want to see each individual sales person’s lists of clients in a certain step in the sales process, they can provide the same task step names to their team.

However, there are situations where you do not want to constrain list generation. Here is an excerpt from a post I did a while back on social bookmarking lists within the enterprise:

“How could Playlists work within a business? Individual project teams can collectively create Playlists to support their work. These can be attached to their wiki or blog. They can be shared and discussed at virtual meetings. At the enterprise or division level, a knowledge manager can create an ongoing library of links to critical documents with annotations on their importance. These could be drawn from the best of team Playlists. Then official enterprise Playlists can be developed that represent the best thinking on specific issues that are important to the company. Employees or teams can download Playlists to fit their work needs. Then, they can make these Playlists once again personal as they engage in work activities by modifying them with both new annotations on the usefulness of existing links, as well as new links. Anyone in the firm, including the original knowledge manager, can access these new derived Playlists to enhance their own or add back into the official enterprise Playlist on the topic for continuous improvement.”

I think the same approach could work with calc{list}™. This tool allows those closest to the contact and have the greatest stake in keeping all the information current and accurate, (like a sales person for that contact) to maintain the information for the benefit and access of all. It is like enabling people to keep their own home pages to maintain their own identity within the enterprise. If there are conflicts in data, calc{list}™ notifies those involved to reconcile the differences. It is nice to see the concept of enterprise 2.0 applied to more and more tasks.