posted 10-18-1999 08:11 PM               

I was sniffing out the latest version of Innovative Logic's Cross Trainer II, the personal health and fitness software we use to battle the inevitable, when I stumbled on this most interesting shareware gem, Computerized Sociometry from Inlime Limited, a shareware developer in Moscow, Russia.

We instantly resonated with this software and the interests of its developer. Timlynn and I met in the doctoral program in mathematical social sciences at the University of California at Irvine. Fifteen years ago when we were wrestling with classic social network datasets, command-line Fortran programs and mainframes were the tools of the trade. We pressed our original Macintosh computers into service using innovative visual databases to graphically display the complex multi-dimensional analyses during our researches and studies.

That was then, this is now... and my, oh my, what an unusually cool 'groupware' tool you should consider adding to your entrepreneurial, project management and/or collaborating free agent toolsets. (It goes without saying how valuable a tool this can be to our role-based executable business model research and development agenda. We'll have more to say about this very soon.)

Anyone who wants to better understand the group dynamics of their teams will find this software useful. Inlime's developers have rigorously implemented a user-friendly and intuitive software tool that makes it easy to apply the classic socio-psychological theories and research methods of pioneer social scientist, R.L. Moreno (of psychodrama fame).

Computerized Sociometry is a 32-bit Windows application that runs on Windows 95, 98 and NT. Judging by the on-line screen shots, feature descriptions and a sample analytic report, this may well be a 'must-have' tool for anyone responsible for managing teams. We have just downloaded this program and will report our hands-on impressions shortly. In the meantime, at a mere 750K download for the 30-day trial, Computerized Sociometry may be one of the most unusual secret weapons a nanocorper or teaming free agent can add to his or her toolkit.