Since the mid-90’s, KM companies have been trying to solve the “expert finder” problem, that is, finding the experts within your organization for a given topic or problem.
While finding the internal expert is critical for all large companies, it’s most acute at large consulting firms and investment banks.
There have been various KM attempts to solve this problem, some simply using resumes (have skills and experience, but never get updated), while others tried to get users to update proprietary databases with skills and interests, generally with low participation rates.
Rod Boothby, at E&Y, posts about how they are using people blogs to capture and maintain the critical information about skills and projects, to quickly find the experts for a project team.
This is another example of how inexpensive and easy-to-use hosted social software applications are solving KM problems where larger, more complex applications failed. The ease of creating blog pages (in this case, using templates for consistency), of linking project pages to people pages, and using standard web search tools, encourages adoption and makes maintenance easy.
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