Article at a glance:

Do you know who your experts are?

Expertise can be surprisingly difficult to find, even in companies that have spent millions of dollars to attract and retain it. Traditional methods, such as document repositories and static directories, are inadequate because expertise, unlike other assets, depends on the context—making it difficult to describe and classify.

The take-away

By mining the details of the current and past work experience of employees—what projects they have participated in, what papers they have written, what they studied in school—new expertise-location systems can often solve the context problem and help companies find the talent they already have within their ranks.