Ecto LS Brief

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  Ecto and the concept of Social Capital.

  
  Social Capital is a core concept in business, economics, organizational behavior, political science, and sociology, defined as the advantage created by a person's location in a structure of relationships. It explains how some people gain more success in a particular setting through their superior connections to other people.
  
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  “The new currency won’t be intellectual capital. It will be social capital – the collective value of whom we know and what we’ll do for each other … When social connections are strong and numerous, there is more trust, reciprocity, information flow, collective action, happiness, and by the way, greater wealth.”

  Kouzes, James M. and Posner, Barry Z. The Leadership Challenge Jossey-Bass, August 2003

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  Ecto helps capture and extend social capital in your organization through a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution that within minutes lets your employees, colleagues, partners and customers begin to share, collaborate and learn in ways that until now was impossible.

  Ecto is a social software solution for delivering the capabilities that you need to enhance the collaboration within your organization that is the foundation for extending your social capital.

  Organizations today are seeing collaboration as a key capability because of the use of global sourcing to lower cost and to tap into new sources for talent, to focus on innovation through internal networks and partnership rather than traditional R&D, and to make the best use of the knowledge, skills and relationships of an increasingly distributed and mobile workforce. (Source: Building an Effective Foundation for Collaboration, IBM Corporation, 2006)

  The three elements that are required to maintain and enhance your organizations social capital are: Connections, Relationships, Shared Context.  With Ecto these three critical areas of collaboration are seamlessly integrated into a single solution that you can rollout to your entire organization in literally minutes.

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  Connections: Network and peer to peer connections, social networking, expertise locators, connection lists with presence indicators, mobile working capabilities.

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  Relationships: Nuanced collaboration capabilities including content creation and sharing, blogging, discussion forums, synchronous and asynchronous communication

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  Shared Context: Unlimited content management capability through a shared library (repository) of content including multimedia such as video and audio (podcast) sharing and a file repository for your documents, spreadsheets and presentations. All of the content in the library is open for evaluation and tagging by the members of the group.
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  All that and an LMS too!

  In addition to the unique and intuitive collaboration environment in Ecto it includes a complete and fully integrated Learning Management System (LMS). This LMS allows you to use the same environment that is used for collaboration to be used to train your staff and it can be extended to train your customers. This LMS leverages the content that you are already sharing in the library and it includes a full assessment and evaluation system.