Expert Management Systems

Another topic that has interested me for a while is the use of Expert Management Systems within organizations. These are effectively ways of keeping track of experts within your organization and mining new ones. I had written an article a while ago that talks about this very aspect within organizations.

“One of the biggest challenges corporates face is locating experts within their company. It is estimated that companies waste 1000’s of man hours just hunting for the right people. Deals have fallen through, mistakes made all because the right people couldn’t be located in time.

In this day and age where almost all the information we work on is digitized and since most of us are accessible via e-mail, messenger service or through video one would think locating a person ( in your own company ) shouldn’t be that much of a problem. Unfortunately the issue is more with locating the right person than just anyone, and Expertise Management Systems seem to be the best way to manage this.

Expertise Management addresses one of the biggest concerns of Knowledge Management, harnessing tacit knowledge. An average organization converts about 5-10% of their employees tacit knowledge into explicit information. Attempting to do so with the rest is a foolhardy proposition, the best way to maximize the use of tacit knowledge is to open up as many channels for that knowledge to flow through your organization. An Expertise Management system does just that. It helps users get in touch with the right people at the right time.

Now we’ve figured out that we need an expertise management system, next comes the question of how to implement a solution like this. Creating a template is the first step, this helps you list out all the information you’d expect to capture from an experts profile in order to help other people locate him/her.

A basic Expertise Management system has the following processes :

• Identify the experts
• Describe the expertise of the expert
• Provide an expert matching mechanism
• Enable users to communicate with the experts
• Provide a feedback mechanism
• Manage the process
• Identifying “new” experts

Tackling each of the above steps in a systematic manner and creating a framework around it will give you the first glimpse of your expert management system.

Creating a “living” expertise management system involves a little more work as the system needs to “mine” information areas associated with the expert ( emails , articles ) and update their profile constantly.”

The benefits of a system like this are instantly felt with employees being able to get in touch with people they had never heard of before.  This allows them to resolve the questions and issues they have a lot faster than if they were to leverage their own people networks.

However, a note of caution. An expertise management system is only as good as the experts contributing to it. If you do not ensure that users have their questions answered quickly, or that experts are interested to participate there is a strong likelihood your initiative will not get off the ground.

What are your experiences with expert management systems? These could either be products available in the market or homegrown ones.

Related posts:

1. Knowledge in Projects
2. Knowledge Inventory
3. Is the term Knowledge “Management” misleading?
4. A Taxonomy perspective to content
5. Who Knows What?