KM for Technical Expertise

These days, companies rely on a wide variety of software applications, from the commercially available to the “home-grown,” from the highly technical to the non-technical. While such tools can help companies make faster, better decisions, many of them have long learning curves that can limit their use to small groups of “experts.” Everyone else in the enterprise must go through an expert if they need information from such an application.

In addition, there is a huge amount of corporate knowledge locked up in the form of expertise—i.e. how to use a particular software application to solve a particular problem. This expertise is frequently lost. Many companies spend a significant amount of time and money training employees to use an application that a former employee already knew how to use.

Here’s a typical scenario: Someone in your organization encounters a technical problem. Your company has commercial or in-house software designed to help, but the only person who knows how to use it is busy working on another project for the next two weeks—or worse still, that person has left the company.

EASA (Enterprise Accessible Software Applications) is a new (US Patent 6,430,609) type of knowledge management tool that allows companies to leverage the expertise their employees have in using software applications. A company’s experts can use EASA’s point-and-click tools to rapidly author simple Web-based applications and “wrap” them around any software running on any computer on the corporate network. The resulting applets can “contain” expertise, hence protecting the novice user from making mistakes, even if the underlying software is very complex. Libraries of these custom applets are accessible over the Intranet, allowing anyone in the enterprise to safely and easily benefit from even the most difficult- to-use software.

Benefits for Business Units and Operations

• A portal of corporate knowledge is encapsulated in libraries of custom applets;

• “Re-invention of the wheel” is eliminated due to the repository of past results;

• Faster design processes are enabled, as engineers no longer have to wait for an expert;

• Best practices and standards are encapsulated, hence ensuring that they are used;

• In-house and legacy code can be made more accessible and more usable;

Benefits for Research and Development

• Experts can focus on innovation, not re-running applications on behalf of others;

• Long learning curves are reduced or eliminated for new employees;

• Return on investment in the license costs of commercial software is increased;

• Return on investment in the development cost of in-house codes is increased;

• Knowledge can be managed and expertise preserved;

• R&D’s value to the enterprise is increased;

• Training costs are reduced;

“In spite of our success with various advanced software tools, I am convinced that we have only found the tip of the iceberg,” says Dr. Dave Davidson, a research scientist with Solutia. “Our engineers, scientists and operators still make many, if not most of their decisions around technical problems using less than the best available technology. If we can get appropriate tools into all of their hands, we might find the whole iceberg. It is our plan to develop these tools and propagate them throughout our enterprise as rapidly as possible, wherever it is sensible to do so. EASA represents an efficient way of doing this.”

How Expertise Management Helps Companies to Combat “Guru Syndrome”

Knowledge management tools offer a variety of methods to capture many different types of knowledge. Expertise, or “knowledge of how to do something”, is a facet of knowledge which is often overlooked, yet the loss of expertise continues to cost corporations millions of dollars a year.

Consider this: typical employee turn over is from 10% to 20%—more in some industries. This means that an employee’s average length of stay in a job is around 5 years. So if you have 10 experts in your company, you will loose one or two by the end of the year, and they’ll take with them 5 to 10 years of expertise. While it’s difficult to put a value on this somewhat intangible commodity, it’s easy to calculate how much it will cost to replace it—if you have 100 experts, the cost to replace the expertise you are losing could be $10M to $20M per year.

There is no magic bullet that can stem this loss completely, but EASA can help to significantly reduce the loss of expertise which pertains to using complex software applications.

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AEA Technologyis an international science and engineering company, with some 2,500 employees in 31 countries in Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia Pacific. In the 2000-2001 financial year, turnover was over $500 million.

AEA Technology’s main markets are transportation, utilities and infrastructure, processing and manufacture, oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, and defense.

If you have any comments, questions, or would like to discuss any part of this paper, please contact info@easa.aeat.com