Mopsos

It seems that the question of locating experts in a big organization is still at the top of knowledge management agendas, and I keep on hearing about projects to merge the content of several people directories developed over time.

I think we should put this into a broader perspective of people databases. For me, there are five different types of people databases used in major organizations:

• 1- The private Rolodexes, which are essentially vcards on our PDAs, which are used to connect to colleagues, customers and friends by phone, IM, e-mail etc.


• 2- The public social networking platforms such as LinkedIn or Facebook, which are increasingly used as expert locators too. We just cannot ignore them because they are the most likely to be regularly updated, like blogs, and people are more and more using external tools to seach for internal people (external blogs at Microsoft are used by Microsoft people as expertise location tools inside the company). Many employees of large organizations are already registered on those systems, especially young people. These are mainly used to discover people and to connect to people we don't know yet through people we know, and customers too!


• 3- The firmwide expert locators, a.k.a. "yellow pages". These categorize people according to a firm-specific taxonomy of expertise. They are used for profiling and thus as a gateway to the firm's internal web-based services (e.g. subscriptions). They can also be used as repositories of CVs and bios to be used in client proposals for services.


• 4- The network specific directories: Each time a practice network is created in a major organization, a new directory is (should be) created because members of this network need to present their expertise according to a network-specific taxonomy. These directories are used for urgent requests for assistance and expertise using IM.


• 5- The HR databases, where confidential information is stored like previous work engagements in other companies, or performance evaluations. They are used for career planning.

So the question is no so much to merge the databases than to adopt a format that allows editing and syndicating people contents regardless of the underlying database. As such, I think it would make more strategic sense for large organizations to work on an XML/web services framework that would make this possible. Once this framework is standardized, then it can be imposed on the various expert locator projects of the company without having to merge databases. I think companies should be spending far more time on interfaces and standards, thereby leaving it to IT people - and increasingly employees themselves!- to develop widgets to mash up information coming from those various databases.

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