Whether internally or in other institutions, it would seem obvious that a knowledge intensive organization would try its best to enable its employees to connect with the right people, beyond just providing a company directory. Yet there are few tools to facilitate the optimal identification of human resources for a given task when it comes to knowledge intensive domains. How useful is a corporate directory if you can’t figure out whom is the right person?

While a smallish number of organizations have fielded such “expertise locators”, they remain rare and rarely heard of outside knowledge management circles. In my work in many very knowledge intensive organizations, I have yet to come across a system that does a good job of answering the question “who is the most knowledgeable person regarding X”. Approximations exist, most noticeably in the form of LinkedIn, but such systems don’t really focus on what the person KNOWS; rather, they tend to follow a traditional cv paradigm, making it difficult to truly assess what the person knows (let’s call it expertise) and compare it with the expertise of others so that a ranking can be generated.

This is why we built http://ResearchScorecard.com, an expertise finder that covers biomedical scientists at Stanford University and UCSF. By data-mining the products generated by scientists, we are able to greatly facilitate the finding of individuals with just the right kind of expertise, AND estimate their level of expertise, so that one can make an informed decision as to whom one might want to consult first. Granted, it is easiest to do such with publicly funded scientists, but in principle a similar approach is possible even within the confines of a private company.