A new KM Opportunity: Instant and Smart Problem Solving by email

Expertise Location and Management (ELM) is a unique way for accelerating problem-solving and innovation in mission-critical business processes, such as R&D;, customer service and sales - generating measurable and rapid return on invest (ROI).

Forget the painful and costly old KM target to put employee’s knowledge on the corporate shelves.

The new KM focus on ELM avoids extracting people’s expertise to feed corporate database.
ELM services locate the right person in the organization with the right knowledge: they fulfill a mission critical task and provide a clear business process accelerator.

The challenge here is to avoid a high upfront investment and maintenance cost in employee profiling without compromising the relevancy of the system.
Mining technology reduces the overhead by automatically building employees profiles in the background.
But a pure technology solution is brittle and needs serious tuning to cope with silence and noise.
When the ELM breaks down and fails to locate an expert, it is likely that somebody somewhere in the organization could take over.
The challenge is really to blend the technology together with the organizational backup and relay (Knowledge Broker) to offer an agile and resilient solution that integrates organizational intelligence.