Expertise Location

A common goal for any knowledge-based organization is to provide people with an easy ability to find others with relevant experience, skills, or knowledge (expertise) when needed. Delivering this in an efficient manner, enabled with appropriate technology, is an objective for most organizations. This capability is vital for such tasks as solving urgent problems and staffing new projects.

Finding deep expertise is an important aspect of this challenge. Expertise goes well beyond experience because it is characterized by profound knowledge about a topic or task. In large organizations, it is often difficult to locate people with deep expertise, especially when the search requires going outside a department, business unit, or geographic location.

Iknow helps organizations design the most effective ways to enable finding and connecting people with relevant knowledge. Our services include:

• Understanding, as part of the Knowledge Audit, all of the information that the organization has about its people across the enterprise, where it sits, and how it can be harnessed.
• Finding efficient approaches to extract and “intuit” relevant people information from existing systems and databases, including their project history and the content they have created and shared.
• Designing and implementing technology that powers personalized people profiles, along with a powerful search to find people based on their backgrounds, profiles, and experience.
• Ensuring that solutions are linked across the entire enterprise by using ontologies, integrating with training and performance development systems, and integrating with other community and collaboration initiatives.
• Helping drive the successful implementation of the expertise location capability, with a focus on organizational change management related to both technology and employee behaviors.
• Applying the lessons and best practices from public domain tools such as LinkedIn.