I read an interesting topic that I think is pretty relevant to the community we have built and are constantly cultivating here at MinuteFix. It has to do with who owns the relationships made between technicians as well as between technician and customer. Most workers know that the “information” they collect and create on the job belongs to their employers. But what about the professional relationships we build? Who owns them?

Businesses are increasingly turning to software that searches through employees’ emails and calendars to determine not just what relationships they have, but the depth of those of relationships, according to today’s Journal. For example, if the software saw that an employee exchanged several emails and had a lunch meeting with someone, it would conclude that the two had a close relationship. Coworkers can find out who in a company has these relationships and take advantage of them to make a sales pitch, recruit a potential employee or just solve a problem. That, of course, doesn’t apply to MinuteFix as we don’t have that fancy software and really encourage Technicians to cultivate relationships with each other.

Think of it as corporate-imposed social networking. One problem many businesses face is that employees willingly share this information about who they know, but they do it on Web sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. It makes sense for a business to try to keep control of this information, or at least try to recreate its own version of it for workers to take advantage of. And as many people have observed, email may be the best untapped social network out there.

Of course, on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook the individual decides what information to share and what information to keep private. A business can choose to install the monitoring software with restrictions that let workers hide some relationships or force searchers to ask the relationship owner for permission before contacting someone. But it doesn’t have to. I think this is the information that floored me. I can’t imagine one of us using a MinuteFix help session to steer a customer to another business or a private session outside the realm of our own great network. I can’t imagine doing it myself either in any workplace; corporate or otherwise.

It’s easy to see how this benefits a business as a whole and workers who don’t have these relationships. But it could come at the expense of workers who have gone to great lengths to build these relationships. In fact, in many professions – journalism, for example, but many others – these relationships can make or break a career.

Any thoughts? I am still mulling over the pros and cons of all this but would love to hear what anyone else has to say.