Do you know?

T+D, May, 2003 by Eva Kaplan-Leiserson

Last week was very humbling for me. I'd recently moved into a new neighborhood, my car was in the shop, and I had to go by public transportation from the suburbs to a conference in D.C. It seemed as if everything was new and I didn't know how to do anything. I didn't know where to get the bus to the metro, where to get off the metro, how to get to the convention center from the metro stop, where to buy coffee, where to go to check in, and who to talk to when my name wasn't on the registered list. You see how it was. Some of this information was available either online or on signs, but I found that die quickest and most reliable way to find out what I needed to know was to ask someone.

Asking is usually faster than looking something up, 99 percent of people are friendly and helpful, and you're usually offered not only objective facts, but also subjective opinions that prove useful. For instance, in my case: "There's a coffee stand over to the right, but the coffee tastes terrible, so you're better off going to the Starbucks around the corner."

How did the people I asked know the answers to my questions? They had experience, or expertise, doing what I was doing for the first time.

But wouldn't my week have been easier if I had some electronic gadgets to help me? If I'd had a PDA with mapping software and a global positioning system that enabled Starbucks to beam a coupon to me as I walked by? Or what if I was one of the first users of a wearable computer that annotated the physical space around me as I looked through its eyepiece, so that I saw arrows in the direction I needed to walk?

www.se.rit.edu/~jrv/research/ar for more on that concept, called augmented reality

Technology can inform us so we can avoid asking people for information, but we lose key elements. We lose not only the human interaction, but also the tacit knowledge a person can give us based on his or her experience and history.

When people start a new job and don't know what to do, they're more likely to ask another employee than check a handbook or access formal learning tools GT8 "Knowledge Stagnatement," News You Can Use (December T D). But what if employees could have the best of both worlds? A new set of tools called expert management software integrate technology and the human touch.

In Transform magazine

www.transformmag.com, a recent article discusses these new tools, which do more than search for information. They enable users to create and share expert profiles and submit questions to be answered by the pros. In short, they enable companies to tap into expertise and tacit knowledge rather than just store and provide access to hard bits of information.

Knowledge management systems have to be continually updated. Expertise management software is inherently dynamic, and it puts the burden on the software--not the user--to sort through information and determine its value, and its author's merit as an expert.

And because most expertise management systems point to content rather than store it, IT requirements are minimal.

I'm not proposing that you immediately start convincing your management team to buy one more expensive technology. Many small organizations can do organically what expert management systems do technologically. But if you're in a large company, especially one that's geographically dispersed, a solution like this might be a big help.

Hey, it would've made my life easier last week.

* More and links to specific systems: www.transformmag.com/db_area/archs/2002/09/tfm0209f1.shtml

RELATED ARTICLE: Survey Can effective people management increase a company s profitability? That's one question PricewaterhouseCoopers attempted to answer in its recent Global Human Capital Survey. After polling HR leaders from more than 1000 companies in 47 countries, PwC found that these people management practices help a company's bottom line:

* an HR strategy that is documented and integrated into the business strategy

* people policies and practices that help deliver the business strategy across the organization

* an HR function that is on the leadership team and can influence the business.

In fact, the study showed that companies with a documented HR strategy had 35 percent more revenue than organizations with no strategy. www.pwcglobal.com/ushumancapitalsurvey to access the survey's executive summary

Read how people practices and Google www.google.com have helped the search-engine company achieve its phenomenal success www.workforce.com./archive/feature/23/41/03ipdex:php (must complete free registration)

Executive Update

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