Last week, Janet discussed some of the challenges of optimizing information flow and the need for expertise location. Today we look at how we can use content to pinpoint experts.
Sites like WebMD are certainly useful. But sometimes when we’re sick, we actually want to go to a doctor. We don’t just want some generalized medical information. We want someone who really knows medicine to give us his or her expert opinion about our particular case.
This same reasoning applies in business. No matter how well we try to capture institutional knowledge in our various document repositories, much of the most valuable information in our organizations remains locked inside the heads of subject-matter experts. So whether we’re looking for insight into a technology, a customer, a vertical market or a geographical territory, sometimes we need to talk to an expert.
But how do we find the right expert for our immediate need? What do we do if we’re not sure who to talk to—or even whether such expertise exists in our organization at all?
Here are three practical ideas to consider:
1) Content metadata is a great tool for discovering experts. Content authorship is a reliable indicator of subject-matter expertise. So we can leverage content metadata to discover individuals with various kinds of expertise across the organization—and beyond it, if we apply our metadata analysis to partner content as well.
2) Experts each have their own “flavor.” Subject-matter expertise is not one-dimensional. Person A may have a lot of expertise on “trade regulations” and “Asia”—while Person B may be an expert on “trade regulations and “Europe.” Understanding these different combinations of expertise can be very helpful when looking for the right person to help with a given business challenge.
3) Social proximity can be an important factor in selecting an expert. When someone needs to talk to an expert, they’re planning to make a demand on that person’s time. We feel much more comfortable doing this with a person we already know to some degree and/or with whom we have something in common. Such a person is also more likely to be willing to give of their time. So, when using content metadata to locate an expert, it’s a good idea to let users look across the organization for someone with whom they have some social proximity—even if that person has slightly less expertise.
With all the attention we give connecting people with the right content, we shouldn’t ignore the equally important challenge of connecting people with the right subject-matter experts. This would certainly save us a lot of wasted time—and might significantly improve the way we handle all kinds of day-to-day situations and issues.
So instead of just concentrating on having our organizations’ experts create content, we may want to be a bit more intentional about using our organizations’ content to find our experts. Such a capability certainly has lots of practical applications—and, given the right content metadata, it’s not that hard to do.
expert, expertise location, institutional knowledge, metadata, optimizing information
