Six Degrees of Separation

Chances are you are familiar with the idea of “six degrees of separation,” that there are at most five people you would need to go through to get to any other person. From the Wikipedia, “Six degrees of separation (also referred to as the ‘Human Web’) refers to the idea that, if a person is one step away from each person they know and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people they know, then everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on Earth. It was popularized by a play written by John Guare.”

I saw the play, but it still doesn’t seem possible that there are only five acquaintances between me and anyone (and I’m not going to do the math at this time); but I do believe that, in the business world, there are usually fewer degrees of separation than six. If you are an active user of business social-media services such as LinkedIn, it’s not hard to see or estimate how many degrees you are away from anyone in your industry.

The tremendous success of social-media platforms confirms that relationships are important; but even with the amazing ability that social media provides in maintaining and discovering relationships, there are still many relationships with potential customers or business partners that you are unaware of in your organization.

That is where cloud-based enterprise-relationship-management (ERM) services such as BranchIt come in. BranchIt analyzes email patterns in your organization to help discover relationships with potential business partners, while keeping the relationship-holders anonymous until they agree to help build a bridge. One BranchIt customer was able to discover employee relationships with more than 20 percent of a list of prospective customers.

Maybe we are only six degrees away from anyone else, but without ERM solutions such as BranchIt to help us uncover the relationships that build bridges between the degrees, that number may as well be infinite.

What applications of enterprise relationship management could you see in your organization?