(*net) Expertise

Wiki sites, because they involve collaborative work, will suggest not only how much each contributor knows, but also how eager they are to share that knowledge and how well they work with others.

Microblogging offers a lower threshold for participation that both helps onboard new people to social software and allows more granular social signaling

thought-provoking emails are regularly appearing

Invite recognised experts or highly regarded employees to join the community.

Manually updated people directory

lists the skills and experience of people in the organisation

view that person’s reporting chain

their peers, and the person’s direct reports

context

When an employee submits an expense, the expense claiming system uses BluePages information to determine who will approve the claim—the manager in the reporting chain. If this information is incorrect the expenses remains unapproved and this situation provides sufficient motivation for the employee to ensure BluePages is updated.

motivate people to enter and maintain this information

projects

experience

interests

link the persona information to the development of communities of practice

LDS automatically creates expertise location information in two steps: first by sifting through an organisation’s documents and automatically creating a taxonomy (a set of categories) for those documents; then extracting people’s names from the documents and associating them to particular categories. With this information one can find people who know about particular topics.

tracking how people are using the documents so that, for example, as a person reads, forwards via email, bookmarks or creates documents their name is more strongly associated to the topic of the documents they have been dealing with

reflect what a person actually does rather than what they say they do

post a ‘knowledge wanted’ message in a public place like the corporate intranet.

subscribe to categories they believe they may be able to answer

Knowledge Networks for Intellectual Capital (KNIC) that enables any of its users to post a request for intellectual capital. This request is emailed to those who have subscribed to that category.

Lotus to post a question about any of the products. Anyone can provide an answer but the relevant product management group must provide an answer within a specified period of time.

IBM Redbooks provide another example. Anyone in IBM (including their clients) can apply to help write an IBM Redbook (typically an in-depth technical description of a product). The current Redbooks to be written are posted in the Internet and people are asked to submit their resume to be selected to participate. If successful they are sent to wherever the product is being developed to work with a team of 6-8 other professionals for up to 4 weeks.

Newly identified experts will begin to receive questions and, depending on the popularity of the topic, could become overwhelmed with the increase workload required to answer questions. A common issue then becomes, “who pays for this person to answer these questions?” An expert within one business line may be required to answer questions from other business lines, and if budgets are divided by business line, this could become an issue.