One common Knowledge Management initiative inside of many organizations is the creation of an expert locator database.  The intention behind these projects is to catalog the knowledge held inside the organization and identify who holds knowledge in a variety of useful subjects.

With such knowledge-resource holders clearly identified project initiators and others seeking knowledge-based assistance will be able to save time seeking quality advice, receive advice from the most qualified parties within the organization and be exposed to new sub-fields of relevant knowledge they didn’t know about as those fields are articulated by experts and cross-listed with the sub-fields  or categories of knowledge familiar to the expert seeker.  Finally, it is believed that expert locators can help forge new relationships by introducing relevant knowledge workers to each other more effectively than personal connections or surreptitious discovery would.

That is the idea, at least.  Unfortunately, a large percentage of expert locator databases sit uncompleted, unchanged or otherwise unconnected to the realities of day to day business.

This process needs to be automated and brought to life.  A company Blogsite can do just that.  When members of your organization are reporting and documenting their work and discoveries on an internal Blogsite channel, one of the things that become possible is the creation of a dynamic expert locator.

Now, instead of scrolling through names entered long ago in a static database organized by subject, you can:

• Search all of the content in your company’s dynamic site, with metadata like keywords most heavily weighted and with results organized in reverse chronology.  This points you towards the members of your organization doing the work most relevant   to your topic, most recently.
• Subscribe to that query to watch these would-be experts over time.  Instead of approaching some one based on a description of their work in a database, investigate the work of potential experts over a week or a month.
• Narrow your observation by creating a channel of content discovered by a query for a small number of key words inside the recent writings of a limited number of team members.
• Interested in a possible initiative in the future?  Create a channel for key words related to the subject.  Even if no one in the organization is discussing it now, any mention of those keywords later will deliver that team member’s words through the channel you created and a possible expert will be delivered in a subject not even imagined at the time of creation for a static directory or database.
• Investigate the validity of claims of expertise and discover unidentified expertise.  It’s one thing to be listed as an expert on a particular subject; its much more effective to query who in your organization has been working on a particular issue and scan their work over time.

All of the above come down to saving time and money by creating the most effective, dynamic catalogue of your organization’s working knowledge assets.  A company Blogsite, by combining an easy content creation tool with high-quality metadata, effective discoverability via search and the power of syndication, is the most powerful expert locator or dynamic directory your organization can deploy.