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Scott Gavin, the collaboration and knowledge management specialist from Applied Trends, has kindly produced E20portal.com's first guest post. Scott has presented at international Enterprise 2.0 conference's and worked with other leaders in this area including Dion Hinchcliffe (previously featured on E20portal.com) and Whatever Company. After discussing the implications for Enterprise 2.0 of the downturn Scott has produced the following article:  | Scott Gavin
| | Collaboration and Knowledge Management Specialist | | Scott Gavin has extensive on the ground experience of implementing wikis, blogs, social bookmarking and other Web 2.0 tools for some of the world’s largest Enterprise's. |
When times are bad and companies are looking for new ways to make money or do more with less, they need to know where the talent sits in the company. The economic climate is forcing 'expertise identification' into the agendas of business and IT managers in all industries. Having attended many conferences and business events since the credit crunch started to bite, I've been surprised by how many executives are talking about knowledge identification of one sort or another.
This is not a new need nor a groundbreaking observation, in fact it's pretty obvious. However what is new is how companies are seeing the potential for Enterprise 2.0 platforms to help them connect with the workforce and allow identification of people based on their real expertise, not just by job title.
Often referred to as SMEs (subject matter experts) there are a number of reasons to identify them inside a company, including: - find people to work on new markets/products
- identify gaps in knowledge which should be core to your company
- identify what impact losing an employee in a given area would have - are there others with similar knowledge?
- find all people who have interacted with a certain product/project
- for regulated industries - identify everyone who’s worked on a certain drug/product
But how should SMEs be identified? It should be a mix of self declaration, identification by others and by the real life information someone interacts with. As an example you might have Jason who identifies himself as and expert in ‘Java’, others tag him with ‘IT’, yet he consistently works with information/content related to ‘Social Media’. Jason should therefore be identified, by a greater or lessor extent, as an SME in all three fields. In other words you are not relying on just job titles and self declaration to find people.
Enterprise 2.0 has some immediate and interesting answers to the problem of identifying SMEs. Due to the nature of how social tools are used you're often able to tie people with content and examine the network they've built and who they interact with. This may or may be representative their job title which is a valuable insight.
In the past it would have been fair to assume that if you used a tool to find an SME in your organization you would at most have access to their contact details. New social tools will allow you to do more than just find an SME and see their phone number. I’ll pick on Knowledge Plaza (an Enterprise 2.0 tool) to demonstrate how SMEs are found and used:
- SMEs are identified with every search result in the system (full text, tag browsing or combination of both)
- Users can see the profile of an SME
- Users can see the recent activities on an SME in addition to their user defined network
- Users are able to interact with an SME, including adding them to their network
- The SME can be used as a filter
Once you’ve found your SME(s) you should be able to use them as a means of finding more information. i.e. if I find Jason in the system I would want to search through his eyes based upon the content he’s interacted with and the network he maintains. This means I’m using the SME, using his or her knowledge and accessing their intellectual capital directly in the system. I can then get a feel for Jason, his content, his interests and most importantly his real life interactions with information and people. For knowledge retention this feature is so important. In the example above I didn’t say if Jason still works at the company or if he left 5 years ago. It shouldn’t matter! Even if he did leave, he still has a link to information, people, the company and his work still has value.
The ability to find and use a SMEs knowledge after they’ve left the company is coming up as a concern time and time again with the companies I have been speaking to. Enterprise 2.0 tools have some of the answers here and it’s now possible to do what some of the knowledge management systems of old promised but didn’t deliver.
Companies should be able to quickly find people inside their organization based on their content as well as their interests. Once found they should be able to do more than just see their contact details!
Scott Gavin is the director of Applied Trends and represents Knowledge Plaza in the UK.
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