Social profiles, expert localisation, who's who tools

Original Message

From: Peter Malling, posted on 2010/03/14

I would like to enquire about your experiences with yellow pages, internal phone books, expert localisation, competency mapping, or whatever term it goes under.

I am referring to the use of technology to improve the way in which people find other people in an organisation. When for instance manning a project team it would be useful to have a system, where you could find potential candidates with certain skills. Many organisations let users enter their skills in free text form, like for instance Sharepoint's skills field in MySite. If, however, competency search were integrated with the organisation's HR-system (human capital management system) for competency management, training management or talent management, and with HR-processes like yearly appraisals where competencies are typically discussed and maybe entered in such a system with marks for each competency, it would be much more consistent. My own experience is that if entry of skills is done by employees on their own will, it becomes much fragmented and incomplete. And then search results also become less useful. This again implies that people don't use searching for people using the system but rather use their social networks to find the right person, which again means that people don't see the need to enter their skills in the system.

I have some questions: 1) What is the proper name for this kind of technology/systems? I've seen the term "expert localisation" being used, but is that still the right term? 2) Do you know of systems that are superior in addressing this issue? 3) Do you know of organisations that use such systems in a way that could be considered best practise? 4) References to literature particularly about this subject?

Peter.

Contributors

All replies in full are available in the discussion page. Contributions received with thanks from:

Peter Malling
Giulio Quaggiotto
Johannes Schunter
Ian Thorpe
Brad Hinton
Peter J. Bury
Jaap Pels
Maarten Samson
Manuel Flury
Arthur Shelley
Denise Senmartin

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