You knew social networking, knowledge management and business efficiency were a freeway crash just waiting to happen, and now it has -- Toronto-based Panorama Software officials say they’re taking “a social approach to knowledge management with a new technology that it’s calling socially enabled business intelligence, using social networking paradigms.”

If it works the way they describe it then yes, it’s a wonderful tool. The software, Panorama Necto, “manages knowledge scattered across the enterprise by identifying relationships between workers based on projects and skills,” which is a highly sensible ordering, but until now there hasn’t been any really good way of finding it.

The “intelligence engine,” Panorama officials explain, “then suggests other enterprise users of relevance to a task at hand and, over time, will record and organize work linked to that relationship for easier future retrieval.”

So what you end up with is a list of some of the most vital connections in your organization, which were always there, but not visible. Eynav Azarya, Panorama’s CEO, is probably right when he says “the value for business is huge.”

Here’s one way it would work: Let’s say a report is to be created about a customer. The way Panorama officials explain it, in that situation “different users across the enterprise with a connection to that customer will find out about each other. They’ll then be able to share information they each house.”

Basically a social networking approach to breaking down the information silos which bedevil organizations. Warren Shiau, director of research with Toronto-based research firm Leger Marketing, gets it right when he says the premise behind Necto is that it “elevates the value of business intelligence by exposing it to a broader audience of users, while increasing the sharing, interaction and collaboration capabilities of the users it’s exposed to... This whole idea of who you’re connected to and who your followers are, why can’t you apply that to business information?”

It can. It should. And now it does.