Your organization’s employees possess expertise on a variety of subjects: sales, services, product launches, project management, and a myriad of other topics relevant to your industry and your business. And it’s likely that members of your organization have expertise in other areas that aren’t even recognized.

It’s well worth the time to identify and access that knowledge, because it can translate into winning new customers, improving cycle times, and creating new business.

What’s more, having quick and easy access to in-house expertise helps employees become more efficient. Consider this: 50 percent of knowledge-worker time is spent “looking up” information, while as much as 20 percent of each employee’s time is spent replicating answers for others. In the end, less than 20 percent of the average knowledge worker’s skills are ever put to use, making worker expertise a sorely underutilized resource.

Define needs first, expertise second

Unless your company is in the trivia-game market, knowledge must be tapped for a purpose, not just for its own sake. Organizations should develop a base of experts in order to meet specific expectations and business initiatives.

Companies can begin by creating a cross-department team to help map out those specific business processes and knowledge needs. Among the guiding questions to explore:

• Whose productivity is affected because of limited access to expertise?
• In what situations is expertise needed?
• Why is the information needed?
• What specific expertise-related needs do employees have?
• What information will enable them to meet these needs?
• How will that information be delivered?

Only after addressing these issues can a company develop an effective expertise search and build a useful system.

Developing a database of employee know-how

The next logical question is, How does an organization access its in-house expertise? The ultimate challenge is to find - and then use - employee expertise. Most organizations will need to develop a kind of “who knows what” database of organizational expertise.

The most basic approach is to keep a modest, inexpensive menu of skills based on information found on employee résumés, through current project responsibilities, from areas of recent experience, and in educational backgrounds.

A more rigorous methodology may involve reviewing additional documents that can offer deeper insights. These can include project files, R&D files, and organizational memos. Additionally, companies can compile a list of specific skills employees possess and a list of clientele or vendors they have worked with. They can also outline the academic knowledge employees have gained from continuing education courses and seminars, and even identify proficiencies in other languages, as well as any hobbies in which employees take part.

If this task seems daunting, consider that companies already hold vast quantities of information about their employees within human resources, accounting, and other internal departments. Even though such information was originally compiled for other purposes, it can be successfully mined to find in-house experts.

In fact, before investing in new software or requiring employees to complete labor-intensive forms, mining existing data is a recommended first step. Companies are often surprised at the information they uncover when various individual databases are integrated.

Obviously, using existing data and already-established processes for systematic data collection is ideal. Whenever information is compiled as part of the everyday workflow, it has the additional advantage of constantly being updated and staying current.

Sophisticated technologies for knowledge sharing

Considering the value of internal expertise, it’s not surprising that there is an entire industry dedicated to new search technologies, profiling capabilities, and unique user interfaces in the form of enterprise-software-based solutions. There are even products that use natural-language parsing technologies to comb through e-mails, instant messages, and other content in search of expert insights. In doing so, these technologies offer many advantages, including static expertise directories.

The most obvious advantage of using sophisticated integrating technology is that it provides more specific (and more valuable) expertise information. However, technology is never an end-all. When considering the acquisition of a high-tech solution, look for one that’s extremely user-friendly while serving your expertise-finding purpose.

Expertise equates to success

No matter the approach, capturing employee expertise is most advantageous when applied to high-end knowledge solutions. The trick is to take once-hidden or hoarded information and make it available across company boundaries so that everyone within an organization can contribute to and benefit from it.