The concept of a central repository for employee expertise is certainly appealing. In today's far-flung global organizations, where the right hand often doesn't know what the left hand has accomplished, an expertise repository can eliminate duplicate effort, help the organization respond to opportunities, and reduce time delays. At least, that's the theory. But the reality is often different.

In this article, we summarize a recent thread on a knowledge management discussion list. Our comments about the responses are in blue text. Then we describe some other approaches and discuss our own experience.

The original message
The discussion started off with the following message:

I was given your name and told that you might be able to answer a few questions I have regarding knowledge management. If you could provide any assistance I would really appreciate it.

I work in core estimating and we're working on developing a database (using Microsoft Access) to track all IDS Estimating employees and their past work experiences. The purpose of this database is mainly twofold:

1. to be able to assess where we need to develop training plans;
2. as a reference database to locate individuals with necessary skills.

Do you think this fits in with knowledge management? Do you know of any resources, either people or applications, that might be able to assist in our development so that we don't have to reinvent the wheel? Do you have any other advice/comments on this?

Responses

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Created on 8/1/2007 l Updated on October 19, 2007