Managing Expertise in the Enterprise— Fundamental to UC Success

Has this ever happened to you? Recently I needed an answer to an expense account question. Since this involved a policy question, I wasn’t sure if I needed someone in HR or accounts payable. How could I identify the resident “expert” in my company to quickly solve my problem?

In a sense, isn’t this why contact centers were invented? Getting the customers to the right people to help them address their individual inquiries. As a result, in the contact center, it’s straightforward — everyone is defined by a certain skill set and it’s relatively easy to route the inquiring customer to the right expert to help them based on that skill set.

This got me thinking. If everyone in the company is like me, a “customer” seeking answers, how does the enterprise identify and manage its experts and expertise? The challenge is not just identifying skill sets but also in providing easy communications methods to leverage that skill. I want to find the right person, someone who possesses specialized knowledge. Ultimately, isn’t this one of the most significant goals of any organization’s Unified Communications (News - Alert) deployment? Helping improve efficiencies and employee productivity — finding the right person, the first time.

The challenge is though… how is the enterprise defining skills? And, is “skills” even the right terminology? Most employees wouldn’t define themselves as having a specific skill set. They might say they have expertise in a certain area or knowledge of a certain type of function. Plus, that list of expertise is going to be considerably longer and more nuanced than what you find in the contact center.

So, as IT starts to think about UC for knowledge management, some questions emerge: (1) how to define people’s expertise, (2) how to manage that expertise, and (3) how to make it available to the enterprise?

First, how do you assess who knows what? Some top companies are using self-assessments, with social networking as an enabling technology. Gary Reiner, CIO of GE, recently told Fortune, “We’ve been building a professional-networking capability that allows everybody to put in the organization directory the skills they bring to bear. It’s very searchable, so if someone is looking for a particular skill, they can go to that site. That gets about 25 million hits a day, so it really is becoming sort of a heartbeat of the company.”¹

Self assessments may also include identifying certifications or proficiencies that go beyond the typical resume items, to include specific industry knowledge or competitor experience. Or, enterprise search and data mining can be used to scan emails, blogs and collaboration tools like Microsoft (News - Alert) SharePoint and look for keywords and name association. Second, where do you store this information? HR systems may be a natural place to start, or perhaps enterprise directories like Microsoft Active Directory that already provide authorization and authentication services. External social networking services like LinkedIn, Plaxo and FaceBook may even extend the knowledge base further.

Finally, how do you make the information available? In the contact center, managers have used group assignments (one group = one skill). Over time, these skills and groups got very granular. You could rank a skill, so you could route your best customer to an agent with X + Y skills and a 1 to 10 subjective ranking on both skills. However, some contact centers are starting to move away from this more complex model because it became too difficult to manage and they were seeing diminishing rate of returns and it didn’t meaningfully impact customer satisfaction! Lesson learned: keep it simple. Just because you can, it doesn’t mean you should.

The contact center knows, from long experience, it’s not trivial to manage expertise. In the enterprise, it will be exponentially more difficult because the environment is much more dynamic and complex. But, it’s absolutely critical. Managing the knowledge of experts throughout the enterprise is going to be essential to the ultimate success of every UC deployment.

Going back to my original dilemma — the expense account question — I know the value of getting to the right person. I knew someone in HR who, if she couldn’t help me, would point me to someone who can. As it turns out, I was able to find the person in HR who could help me. In the future, the right tools like data mining applications, social networking sites, and enterprise directories can make the knowledge base even more comprehensive and data-rich for the next person looking for the same information.

Making these connections requires technology as fluid and interconnected as human relationships. As technologies and methods evolve for companies to manage their knowledge assets, there is much to learn from contact centers. IT

Footnotes:

¹ Fortune Magazine, “Information worth billions: General Electric’s CIO, one of the world’s most influential, tells how he makes infotech pay in a big way,” by Geoff Colvin, July 21, 2008.

Mike Sheridan is Senior Vice President, Strategy and Marketing, of Aspect (News - Alert) Software, Inc. (www.aspect.com).

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