Securing the Power of Enterprise Expertise
by Kamoon
Kamoon’s EEM matches the Tough Questions to the correct people
Employees spend 30% of their time searching for information, resources and answers, yet only 20% of an enterprise’s knowledge is retrievable (Delphi Group). Securing answers for employees and capturing the tacit knowledge for future use are fundamental business goals and processes in all enterprises. The costs of the current “search-for-answers” process includes:
- Valuable time spent searching for experts, questions and answers that do not exist in explicit knowledgebases.;
- Product-development tacit knowledge that is lost from future learning opportunities.;
- Critical deadlines that are missed.;
- Repeating the same time-consuming processes for the same questions, with no capture of answers for future use.;
- The impact on results and service of “best guess” instead of the right answer.;
- Lack of management visibility insight into the question-and-answer (Q&A) process.;
Matching available experts and resources to needs is fundamental to business processes in all enterprises. Even if your company has traditional knowledge management search capabilities, where do your employees turn when they need to find the right person and do not know who that person is? Can your company track the interaction and capture the information exchange, once the person is found?
Complete enterprise expertise management (EEM) drives productivity by: finding the right expert; enabling the Q&A interaction process; securing an answer; capturing the questions, answers and behavior; and enhancing the Q&A process for future needs. Accomplishing these goals enables employees to spend more time selling and completing their projects instead of searching for answers.
EEM technology matches inquiries to the right expert, facilitates the right interaction process through action-oriented workflow, captures the questions and answers in a FAQ database and provides measurement tools for enhancing the entire question-and-answer process. Such a solution drives increased productivity for sales forces, project teams, channel partners and employees across the enterprise by enabling them to find and interact with the right person who can deliver critical information when it is needed most and to proactively manage the Q&A process.
“Enterprise expertise management is a critical component to generation-three portals, providing a complete Q&A process and management tool. EEM is the next step in interaction management by giving a defined structure for finding the right person to answer a question or need while taking into account expert availability, workload balance and overall business priorities to achieve the best results for requestor and expert. EEM brings additional results-driven functionality to enterprisewide portal deployments,” says Gene Phifer, Vice President & Research Director, Gartner, Inc.In knowledge-centric enterprises, it is critical to have a central place for employees to find answers. Many companies lack the infrastructure and business processes to match the user’s inquiry to the most appropriate expert or to capture the information. This means, if the question has not been predefined in existing databases, the company does not have the ability to route to the appropriate expert and leverage their knowledge workers. As a result, the inquiry either goes unanswered or costs the organization a considerable amount to provide an answer.
With an EEM solution, a company has the power to define the entire Q&A process with action-oriented workflows and business rules. When an employee submits a question, it is automatically routed to the right expert along a defined workflow. The questions can be managed with unique processes for different communities, divisions, departments and the overall enterprise with their own interaction management policies. In addition, the critical Q&A information exchange is captured for future reference.
Kamoon Partners with Tacit for Unisys Solution
Kamoon Inc., a provider of Enterprise Expertise Management (EEM), and Tacit Knowledge Systems, Inc., a provider of Expertise Automation for the enterprise, partnered to integrate the two companies’ products.
“Kamoon provides an enterprise solution that helps companies achieve their knowledge management goals of enabling their different communities to work uniquely and scale to enterprise knowledge needs. We deliver results for our customers by enabling the capture of tacit knowledge, providing visibility into the process, and ultimately by helping the employees accomplish their business goals,” said Yali Harari, Kamoon’s President and CEO, of the partnership.
“In large, dynamic organizations, individual employees have a tremendous amount of knowledge to offer each other, but unfortunately, much of this expertise goes undiscovered and unused,” adds David Gilmour, President and CEO of Tacit Knowledge Systems. By adding expertise profiling, “companies make it possible for the full talent of each individual to be continuously delivered within their knowledge portals and online communities, and in the future, anywhere else the company wishes to make it available,” says Gilmour.
Unisys, the information services and technology company, has recently signed on for delivery of this integrated solution for its own Enterprise Expertise Management system. The integrated solution will give knowledge workers all over Unisys the ability to access key knowledge, share expertise and collaborate easily across job functions. The large-scale deployment required a sophisticated expertise profiling system to map all 35,000 experts quickly and accurately and a method to continually update profiles based on new experience and skill sets.
“We wanted a solution that would give our knowledge workers the ability to access key knowledge, share expertise and collaborate easily across job functions, business units and geographies,” said Susan McCabe, Director of Knowledge Management at Unisys. “Kamoon Connect with Tacit ESP offered us a solution with simple user interfaces, dynamic, automatic profiling and flexibility to support the unique needs of the many unique knowledge communities at Unisys. We believe this combination of capabilities will support rapid adoption, continual use and high returns.”
For more information, please visit the company at KAMOON or call 201-242-9311