Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Collaborative Detectives


A host of IT product companies are coming up with collaboration tools.

Microsoft’s Sharepoint and IBM’s LotusNotes were early in the market. SAP’s StreamWorks, Salesforce’s Chatter, Sucessfactors’s CubeTree have joined the bandwagon now. Cisco announced that their Quad would hit markets later this year.

But analysts still feel that the market for collaborative tools is pretty small. We have to wait and watch to find if the markets expand to accommodate these tools. Probably every one of these companies would acknowledge that facebook success is an inspiration for them. Yes, facebook was one of the first successful collaborative tools.

There would be several use cases on – “when and where and how” these tools can be used to make money in business.

But here is a practical implementation of collaboration using facebook.

The Director General of Police, CID department of Karnataka has started a facebook page. Here apart from some general announcements regarding crimes, the DGP asks for views, ideas on specific cases. General public like us who generally have lots of ideas about everything in the world, can help the CID team. In turn we are helping ourselves by reducing crime. It’s a great initiative by the DGP. If you are on facebook, join DGP in controlling crime.

Arguably, blogs can also be a collaboration tool. Though very primitive, views can be exchanged and information can be spread fast. This was the idea when the Dakshina Kannada district police started blogging on crime in the district. The response to the blogspot site has now promoted the DK police to have a site where every crime registered in the locality are described. Complaints can be registered on line. Progress can be checked.

Kudos to the police department.
It’s our time to act and help the police in their novel initiatives.

Links –
Facebook link of DGPCID
Website of Dakshina Kannada district Police (blog included)
Earlier blog site of  Dakshina Kannada district police 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

DGPCID - good work.
Are you the advertisement manager for DK, Udupi?
- Sundar

Prakash Nyamagouda said...

good one anna