Perhaps the most valuable achievement of a highly-functioning Knowledge
Management system is the ability to identify a colleague within your
firm who has pretty much the exact expertise you’re looking for, when
you need it. I call this the "Ask Sally" moment, as in "Ask Sally;
she’ll know."
Traditionally, firms that have tried to create this capability have
approached matters with a fairly blunt instrument: Surveying everybody,
or at least every professional, to ask them point-blank where they consider
themselves an expert. Of course there are any number of problems
with this, from the practical (it takes time; it needs constant updating)
to the epistemological (do you mean what I mean by "expertise?"). Stories
of companies investing millions to create such systems, and then watching
them lie dormant and neglected, are legion.
But what if it turns out that your firm might already know
most of what it needs to about your professionals? If you cobbled
together—this means you, IT!—information from many of the
internal databases you already have, might you not end up with a reasonable
facsimile of such a system?
For example, HR has information on
everything from what office and department you’re in to where you went
to law school, what CLE topics you’ve studied, and who you’ve worked
with (performance reviews). Finance
and accounting know which clients and industry groups you’ve worked for
and how much and for how long (time and billing records). Marketing
knows if you have any articles, whitepapers, or even patents to your
name. &c. Pull all these together with baling wire
code, set an internal version of Google or Verity loose on it, and you
might be surprised how far you get. This
could be a case of knowing more than you think you do.
Better yet, you don’t have to survey anybody, and the information is
continually refreshed through the ordinary course of doing business. Before
you give me too much credit for this, read McKinsey’s take on it.
