IBM Expertise Locator

Our IBM Collaboration Services Expertise Locator solution provides an entirely new level of access to experts and expertise within your organization. We have taken a social approach to mobilizing and delivering the collective intelligence of your organization. Expertise is not often found quickly or easily within sizable organizations, increasing the distance between your users and subject matter experts. Our Expertise Locator solution provides a far more fluid method of seeking and finding expertise anywhere in your organization.

Key Features & Functions

• Rapidly access the vast, collective knowledge of experts through a mobile app (iOS & Android) or web search
• Search for subject matter experts based on their expertise
• Browse keyword categories
• Select from a list of popular keywords
• Easy to use, fast, and efficient
• Can be customized to search and analyze your existing knowledge repositories and data sources
• Experts keep their digital profile and tags current
• Experts prioritize and redirect to another expert when needed
• Leaders and managers enable and support sharing expertise
• Seekers and experts collaborate according to guidelines
• Recognition via public thanks encourages future collaboration

Key Business Values

• Product & Service Innovation

  • Helps demonstrate, deliver and showcase the power of social business
  • Portray the expertise of every user through their digital footprint to highlight their skills, knowledge, experience, network and contributions to other users
  • Optimize workforce planning by applying analytics to a dynamic inventory of industry, technical and professional skills

• Smarter Workforce

  • All employees are experts who have a responsibility to share their expertise and contribute to the client experience
  • Everyone in the organization benefits from sharing and receiving social knowledge and expertise
  • Users share their expertise because it can help enhance their reputation, network, and ability to contribute to client results
  • Users can differentiate themselves by using social business capabilities to share and surface their expertise
  • Users can discover new ideas and perspectives by sharing their knowledge with others

• Customer Care & Insight

  • Users can bring unexpected and inspiring solutions to clients for problems they might not know they have.
  • A faster response to a client’s need for expert insight can help differentiate organizations from the competition
  • Sharing expertise connects your users, fuels innovation and delivers a differentiated client experience
  • Employees share their expertise, helping build deep, trusted relationships with clients

• For Leaders

  • Employees feel a stronger connection to business results – via sharing expertise that is valuable to clients
  • Better business outcomes – when sellers can get the best expert to help them quickly, they will close more deals, faster
  • Better visibility of experts and expertise helps bolster IBM’s prominence in the marketplace
  • Improved employee satisfaction through more meaningful engagement in deals

• For Managers

  • Opportunity to grow and develop people – matching the expertise of your org with sales situations helps your employees grow and gain valuable skills
  • Improve employee morale – people can see their technical eminence grow as they are “thanked” and “favorited” because of the work they do
  • Make employee feedback sessions easier – The contributions of your employees are visible for all to see and track
  • Watch the reputation of your organization grow as the expertise of your employees becomes known

Deployment Approach

We recommend deploying Expertise Location in three stages

• Discovery – Conduct an inventory and assessment of your expertise sources to set the scope of the pilot and production system
  Typical duration = 2-3 weeks
• Pilot – Prove the value of the solution in your organization, to refine the expertise selection rules & privacy settings and to remove any technical obstacles to wider deployment.
  Typical duration = 1-3 months
• Production – Following a successful pilot, Enterprise Roll-out consists in scaling up the deployment to your entire organization.
  Typical duration = varies according to customization needs