Expertise profiling is the collection and storage of the backgrounds, experiences and expertise of individuals with relevant knowledge. Expert directories typically list an individual’s name, title, and contact information as well as a comprehensive profile or professional biography. Expert directories allow project teams, work groups, departments, communities, and employees across the enterprise to find the expertise resident in their organizations. Often, expert directories include experts from external sources. Commercial software tools enable users to quickly search, filter, and analyze relevant expertise. Additional software capabilities can include automatic categorization, taxonomy browsing, and advanced search.
Business value from expertise profiling is achieved from having immediate and direct access to available expertise. When employees are confronted with a new or difficult assignment, they spend much time hunting for information by sending numerous e-mails, making phone calls, searching their intranet, and using their own personal network to find a suitable expert. Even after all this effort, the employee often fails to find someone with the necessary expertise or solution. Without being able to leverage this expertise, the employee will then start from scratch, leading to longer cycle times for completing tasks and activities and duplicate and redundant work. Expertise profiles improve the quality and speed of execution by increasing cross-silo communication, reducing re-work, and shortening employee ramp-up. Access to internal and external experts through a searchable directory improves a company's performance through faster cycle times, increased efficiency, and better decision making.
Iknow has deep expertise in managing all aspects of expertise profiling systems from initial requirements gathering, to finding experts in an organization, to understanding the use of experts in an organization, to system customization and deployment. Iknow’s experience in enterprise search and community management allows us to find the hidden experts in an organization, and to help you to find them once we do. We have completed expertise profiling projects of all sizes, including designing systems that combine expertise profiling with document management to attach documents to their creators.