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General Information
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December 30, 2005
• Vol.27 Issue 52
Page(s) 29 in print issue
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The Logic Of Expertise Location
Tap Into Employees’ Backgrounds & Experience To Gain Competitive Advantage
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Small to midsized enterprises today need to leverage all of their personnel and technical assets to stay competitive in the marketplace. Typically, an organization tracks an employee’s experience and skills in his resume, but the value of employee expertise too often falls beneath management’s ongoing attention.
Expertise location or expertise management is an offshoot of knowledge management, focused on capturing the experience of your data center staff in a searchable format that can help you gain an edge on external and internal projects. It’s a perfect option for SMEs seeking to tap into the expertise of their technical staff to gain a competitive advantage.
 Getting Started With Expertise Location
Your SME can put its own expertise location project into place using software and information that is already in-house to track staff skill sets and expertise and start your own “home brewed” expertise location system.
Anil Kumar, general manager of service and support for AskMe, a knowledge management software vendor, advises that organizations wanting to implement expertise location begin at their staff’s resumes. “This information, including education [and] current and past projects, can serve as the core of a database for tracking your employees’ areas of expertise.” Further, he points to the value of “cross pollination of ideas amongst business groups.”
You can seed the initial launch of an expertise location system using any of the popular flat-file or relational database management systems you may already have in-house. The first step is to pull together the expertise and experience of your organization’s staff into a searchable format in a database. Collaboration tools such as Wikis and Microsoft WSS (Windows SharePoint Services) are also potential options for tracking employee expertise in an online central repository.
It’s easy to think of an employee only to the skills of her job, but to reap the full benefits of expertise location, you must focus on her skill sets. Kumar advises, “Look past the job description.” For example, think of a database administrator who has system administrator expertise. The DBA may not have any system administration responsibilities in his current position, but the company still should benefit from this employee’s expertise.
Managing Expertise Location Deployment
Kumar calls an expertise location deployment “a classical IT deployment but not a classical IT project.” He further emphasizes the importance of business unit involvement in adopting expertise location that makes such a deployment differ from a straight technology deployment. expertise location requires the talents of the business side and technical side to develop a usable expertise location solution that can benefit the bottom line of the company.
Expertise Location vs. Knowledge Archipelagos
Unfortunately, knowledge sharing isn’t the norm in every organization. Sometimes “knowledge archipelagos” develop in organizations as employees keep technical knowledge on their own islands, promoting their own agendas and not sharing information across business groups.
Implementing expertise location in such an environment poses different challenges. Strong executive sponsorship of the expertise location is especially critical to counter such dysfunction. The expertise location project team needs to understand the organizational political dynamics and roots and why it exists in the corporate culture because according to Kumar, “there is no silver bullet” for this obstacle. A measure of diplomacy and creativity are also helpful because you’ll have to sell expertise location just as if you are selling a product or service to an external client. However, he points to the value of a smart communications and marketing plan for an expertise location project. It’s important to communicate the value of sharing information across business groups vs. keeping it insular.
Implementing Expertise Location
Kumar further stresses the importance of understanding your organization’s exact needs and goals for expertise location. It’s especially important to understand the skill sets and expertise of your organization’s employees. Not understanding these project elements can be cause for failure.
Expertise location systems require the classic cross-functional team for a successful implementation because of their need to draw upon existing HR systems. Proposal and business development staff, professional services staff, and IT staff such as the data center staff can all contribute to a successful expertise location rollout.
As a veteran of expertise location projects, Kumar recommends that organizations implementing expertise location spend enough time up front doing critical analysis, thinking, and project discovery in the early stages of the project.
A phased deployment is another key to the successful introduction of expertise location into an organization. Rolling out expertise location department by department can help foster success stories that can further sell the value of expertise location into reluctant pockets of an organization.
The Value Of Expertise Location
Expertise location can inject an innovative process into an organization. While many see knowledge management and especially expertise location in the domain of large enterprises, the introduction of expertise location into an SME adds value on multiple levels, including the faster, more efficient execution of projects. Kumar also points to the value of reusing project information. Expertise location moves the reuse of project information from the proposals or business development team updating staff resumes at proposal deadlines to a centralized repository that combs the expertise of the whole organization. 
by Will Kelly
Build Your Own Expertise Location System
• Form a cross-functional team for the expertise location project, drawing on staff from IT, operations, project management, and other groups who can benefit from tracking employee expertise.
• Choose a searchable online repository for resumes from in-house commercial software such as a flat file or relational database. Other options include a Wiki or a SharePoint site.
• Decide on a resume format, including specific expertise you want highlighted in the resume.
• Have your employees update their resumes to meet the agreed-upon format and submit them electronically to the expertise location team.
• Pull together electronic versions of past proposals and other business development materials and add them to your online expertise location repository.
• The expertise location team should assign team members to manage and cultivate the expertise location repository. |
View the chart that accompanies this article.
(NOTE: These pages are PDF (Portable Document Format) files. You will need Adobe Acrobat to view these pages. Download Adobe Acrobat Reader)
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