How to Leverage Your Organization's Expertise

Regardless of whether we talk about knowledge in our personal lives or our professional careers, the truth is that knowledge goes hand-in-hand with power. It is hardly surprising that one of the most critical and yet overlooked aspects of improving the workplace is the management of knowledge. When employees can't find the information they need to complete their work, it can lead to serious consequences for an organization. Organizing knowledge assets and keeping them accessible can reduce the risks of misunderstandings, ensure knowledge transfer internally, and help to ensure effective knowledge management.

One more topic that we will discuss today in this blog post is Expertise Location, which is essentially finding people who have extensive knowledge on a certain topic and leveraging that knowledge for the best possible outcome. Knowledge Management provides an opportunity to address this important aspect of a company's strengths and weaknesses related to its employees. 

Expertise Location: What is it?

With knowledge management becoming increasingly important to businesses, organizations have begun to recognize the importance of identifying the right experts on specific topics, whose expertise can be applied to a business' goals and objectives. In addition to this, it is also possible to validate and qualify the expertise of an individual within the limits of a certain range of experience. Moreover, it provides an opportunity for individuals to declare that they have knowledge, and then substantiate that claim through their work.

In Gartner's glossary of terms knowledge expertise is defined as follows: 

In order to integrate expert knowledge into the interaction process to the fullest extent possible, it is important to determine the location of available human expertise at the time of the interaction. In order to make use of this information, we create visualizations that provide detailed representations of skills, geographic regions, and the availability of the expertise in addition to other factors relevant to its implementation. (Gartner)

What's the best way to find experts?

It is possible to determine the level of expertise that you possess by using a variety of approaches and tools. The following are a few of them:

Expertise Location – Profiles

Let's start with profiles. This type of database is often created and populated by the users. The completeness and accuracy of these databases varies widely from one another. With the help of a tool for managing expertise, we could create and store these profiles. Additionally, there will be self-proclaimed experts who will create and manage social profiles, such as blogs, LinkedIn profiles, and other public and private profiles.

There are still some organizations that use spreadsheets to track employee expertise, even if they aren't actually using them anymore. Besides large consulting firms, medium sized consulting firms also use this format with sections relating to their sector expertise, their horizontal expertise, and the kind of projects they have been involved with in information management, etc.
All of these approaches are problematic because they heavily rely on individuals providing accurate and complete information about their abilities without exaggerating them in any way. In addition, the documents are often outdated by the time all the necessary staff members have reviewed and approved them.

Expertise Location - Profiles 

• Often User-Generate and Populated 

• Accuracy Can Vary Widely 

• A personal blog, a LinkedIn profile, a social media profile, and profiles on other public and private social media services are included. 

• Tracking the areas of expertise of employees is done by some organizations using spreadsheets. 

• Individuals are heavily relied upon to report their expertise as completely as possible. 

Expertise Location – Interaction

Let's talk about how your peers perceive your expertise. How do others see your competence? With LinkedIn, you can not only display your profile, but also see endorsements and recommendations from other users.

You can also take an interaction-centered approach by creating communities of practice. Earlier, we mentioned that there are groups based on specific technologies, processes, or problems we face. Individuals' perception of the benefits of participation are based on their level of interest, as well as their perception of their expertise in the community, which is determined by their participation, speaking, organizing, etc.

There is also a category of Question and Answer platforms (Q&A) in addition to the first two. Users can ask questions using these tools, or sometimes anyone can. 

Everyone can answer questions, and those questions and answers can be rated. Due to this, it's pretty obvious which experts can handle a topic or issue. The unexpected thing about these surveys is that they can also reveal lapses in existing documentation, training, etc., so that gaps can be closed.

Expertise Location - Interaction 

• How do other people perceive your expertise? 

• Can also display skills and endorsements and recommendations from other people. 

• Communities of Practice 

• Question and Answer  (Q&A) Platforms

Expertise Location – Analytics: 

This review concludes with a discussion of how you can identify experts based on analytical techniques. You can do this by using content analytics. You could do it by evaluating how often and how good people contribute to documents in the repository, with the idea that the better and more frequent the contributions, the better the level of expertise.

You can also analyze social media traffic with analytics. Does anybody know who gets emails about a particular topic, who blogs about a particular topic, and whose articles or tweets get re-posted and re-forwarded? Specifically, social media networks present opportunities to identify expert knowledge across a variety of niches by using a phenomenon known as a "social graph," or individual interactions across a variety of social platforms.

Expertise Location - Analytics: 

• Relies on the power of analytics to identify experts.

• Uses content analytics to evaluate to identify individuals’ contributions to documents in the repository. 

• Can also leverage analytics to analyze email traffic or social media traffic. 

What are the most common issues with expertise location?

There are a number of reasons why the search for experts can be complicated. The first and perhaps most obvious one is false expertise, which happens when someone claims to know something they don't. There may be a few reasons for this, but the analytics and interaction-based approaches should make figuring it out pretty simple.

Additionally, there are often discrepancies between what people claim to be experts on and what they actually are. We might be able to understand this by looking at the proliferation of creative titles like “Information Maven” that go beyond descriptive ones. However, it's not uncommon for people to be hired for one thing, but have a passion and skills for something else that the organization would really benefit from if it only knew about it.

In conclusion, we would like to mention "expert fatigue". This occurs when a company depends on an expert in a way that overwhelms the professional, resulting in stress and overwork. Therefore, a center of excellence may be created where those specialists can staff it full-time if such a capability is required.

Knowing what your organization knows is important

Innovation and bottom line performance are directly impacted by a knowledge management culture and expert locations. A poorly managed organization is likely to suffer from rework, stagnation, and inefficiency.

Every tool and approach has its pros and cons, in my opinion. Some options will fit your specific circumstances better, and it is important to consider all of your options.

Even though you may select any tool(s), those that utilize automation and analysis are almost always the most effective and are much more straightforward to use and implement than manual and self-reporting methods.