Tracking the Experts Regardless of whether we’re talking about open or closed innovation, building open source or proprietary systems, or discussing operating under a product-centered business model, a customer-centered model, or a co-creation model, companies can’t effectively compete unless they can locate and organize the available expertise. But, expertise can be surprisingly difficult to find, even in businesses that have spent millions to attract and retain world-class experts. The problem isn’t that the company doesn’t have the expertise; it’s that no one knows who has it or how to find it.
As made plain by the rising importance of the trends discussed earlier, the market capitalization of companies today depends on their ability to keep innovating. That, in turn, depends on their ability to organize and manage the expertise of their personnel to produce tangible new value.
Unfortunately, organizational systems and priorities are still primarily based on industrial-era priorities that focus on cash, inventory, and fixed assets. Many firms have had some success in terms of managing and organizing codified intellectual property like patents, trade secrets, and business methods so as to optimize their return on investment. However, most efforts to usefully manage and track expertise within organizations and their broader networks have been disappointing.
In some companies, a formal process hasn’t been necessary. The greatest successes seem to come from companies with small, simple organizational structures, where informal social networks have been reasonably effective in putting experts in touch with those who need their services.
But today, it’s becoming rare to find a company where most people know who to call. Mergers, growth, globalization, and employee turnover have diminished the ability of informal social networks to ferret out experts. As a result, many companies, such as IBM and BP, are finding they need a system to keep track of their experts.
Unfortunately, as Michael Idinopulos and Lee Kempler explain in The McKinsey Quarterly 2003, Number 4 issue, there has never been a good way to get the job done. Until recently, companies had two primary ways of tracking their institutional expertise: document repositories and expertise databases.
Neither of these can help seekers of expertise very much. Written documents reflect only a fraction of what an expert knows, while expertise databases quickly become out-of-date.
Now, a trend toward using information technology to effectively track and manage organizational expertise is beginning to emerge. How are they doing it? The typical company already tracks information about the expertise of its employees. This includes what projects they are working on, what papers they have written, and what they studied in school.
The company can therefore use search technologies to mine this information and find expertise in a way that it simply can’t do using document repositories or static directories. And depending on the state of a company’s data systems, the solution can be surprisingly affordable and easy to implement.
Most of the “expertise directories” in use today can’t relate their short, context-free summaries of a person’s areas of expertise to a specific problem the company wants to address. To solve this problem, companies are starting to characterize expertise in ways that are sensitive to different contexts.
People who are looking for expertise examine an internal expert candidate’s track record just as they would the track record of an outside hire. This includes background information, work experience, and references. Although this type of information seldom appears in expertise directories, it can often be found distributed across a company in various databases, such as those used in human resources, accounting, and patent registration.
Traditionally it was hard to quickly get at this information and relate it. But today’s search engines can retrieve and rank millions of records in seconds. Everything that makes up the collective experience of the company and its employees can be found almost instantly. Rather than settle for the simplifications required to force-fit expertise into a static directory, companies can now have a greatly enhanced expertise locator tool, something like Google.
A small but growing industry is trying to improve the whole process of locating expertise by devising enterprise-software-based solutions, many of which combine new search technologies, profiling capabilities, and unique user interfaces. Several products use natural-language parsing technologies, for example, to distill an individual’s areas of activity and interest by automatically combing through e-mails, instant messages, and other types of self-refreshing content.
Companies have a great deal of information about their people stored in HR, accounting, knowledge-management, intellectual-property, and even recruiting systems. Most is captured for other purposes, but it can be precisely what expertise seekers need. Before companies invest in new software or ask their employees to fill out lots of new forms, they should see what they already have in those systems.
At such an early stage, it’s hard to say exactly how this is going to play out, but we’d like to offer three forecasts for your consideration:
First, by 2008, we expect 80 percent of the Fortune 500 and virtually all large professional services firms to be routinely using context-sensitive “expertise directories” to track and manage their expert resources. This will enable firms to leverage existing talent much more effectively, which will become a critical competitive factor during the forthcoming “skills shortage.”
Second, we forecast that most of these “expertise directories” will be built by combining off-the-shelf products from companies like Google and Verity with company-specific user interfaces and query structures. The result will be powerful and flexible cross-platform systems with global-reach, built and maintained at relatively low cost.
Third, we forecast that the focus of the Chief Knowledge Officer’s job will shift from management of explicit knowledge to the tracking and acquisition of human expertise and tacit knowledge. As such, the CKO role will become increasingly intertwined with Human Resources.
References List :1. The McKinsey Quarterly, 2003, No. 4, "Do You Know Who Your Experts Are?" by Michael Idinopulos and Lee Kempler. ⓒ Copyright 2003 by McKinsey and Company. All rights reserved.
