As a human resource executive you know that your employees and their knowledge
are the most important assets of you company. Your organization has likely spent
hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on knowledge worker support systems –
from email to knowledgebases to collaboration platforms to social networks. You may
even think that such legacy systems are ‘good enough’ for profiling employees’ skills
so that you can perform critical elements of your job such as project staffing,
succession planning, or talent management. However the business environment is
constantly changing and knowledge technologies continually evolve. As a senior HR
leader it is your job to keep abreast of the workplace trends and technological
advances that impact expertise tracking and knowledge discovery. And you have to
take a corporate-wide view on how these affect the bottom line and every employee
in the company – from sales to HR to product development.
This paper helps ease that responsibility for you by highlighting five current trends
and the questions they raise regarding expertise inventory and discovery processes.
It also summarizes improved methods for understanding who knows who and who
knows what within a company so that you can more easily hire, retain, organize, and
develop your workforce.