VideoThere was a time in the early '90s when "expert systems" were heralded as a breakthrough in knowledge management. The goal was to capture and forever reap the rewards of a company's best and brightest. The systems took various forms, but all in essence sought to extract, through interviews and other means, a talented employee's genius for, say, picking stocks (or, at Campbell's, making a perfect batch of soup), and embed it in software. Software, after all, doesn't call in sick, or sign on with a competitor.
It was an appealing vision, but it remains mostly that. While the larger category of artificial intelligence still garners interest at universities and research firms, it finished dead last in a recent poll of technologies of interest to corporate executives. But there is still plenty of expertise walking the halls at most companies, and few efforts to make the most of it. McKinsey & Co. consultant Michael Idinopulos and principal Lee Kempler offer a new approach: don't try to bottle the expertise, just be content to find it when you need it.
Many companies use databases or document repositories of some sort to track employees' expertise, but that information is often captured in a few high-level bullet points that miss key data. Rolling out a new salty snack in Ohio? You'll find several people who cite "product launches" as competencies, but you probably won't know that one of them went to school in Columbus and worked on a nearly identical launch early in her career; thus, the ideal candidate risks going untapped. Experience is not the same as expertise, of course, but Idinopulos and Kempler say it is a "frequent companion" and should be tracked more closely.
Now, using a combination of search-engine and database-integration techniques, it can be. Companies can buy or build new, more-sophisticated systems that truly capture an employee's relevant experiences, interests, and other data. Software can scan documents, forms, and even E-mail messages to create a rich profile of every worker. Interfaces can be customized so that seekers of expertise can slice and dice competing experts' backgrounds, or select by geography, time zone, or other criteria. Such an effort could take several months and cost as much as $500,000, although the cost could be less if a company already has a data warehouse that can act as a repository for this deeper view of employee experience. Compared with what companies have spent on other forms of expert systems, that's a small price to pay for a legitimate brain gain.
Dot-Bombs Away?
It's been several years since you could find the words Internet, initial public offering, and billions of dollars in the same sentence (barring those written in the past tense, of course). But as Nasdaq has climbed, so too has activity in the high-tech IPO space. For example, RedEnvelope.com raised about $30 million in late September, and days earlier the parent company of proFlowers.com filed for an IPO, seeking funds for new online gift ventures. True, RedEnvelope still operates in the red, but many analysts took the IPO as a sign of life not only for E-tailers but for the dot-com world in general.
That space may get an enormous boost in the next few months if a planned IPO by Google goes ahead. The Internet search-engine firm plans to raise $15 billion to $25 billion. While the firm has been talking to investment banks, there are also reports that it may offer shares via an online auction, in an attempt to give the little guy a chance.
Google is widely believed to be profitable, with annual revenue estimated at nearly $800 million. Co-founder Sergey Brin had said as recently as a few months ago that no IPO was imminent, in part because having to meet quarterly expectations would be a distraction. Many a CFO can relate to that, although Brin may have 25 billion good reasons to cope with such distractions. If so, that may further propel Internet-oriented stocks, which are already up more than 100 percent since hitting their all-time low in October 2002.
That's Why We Use Lots of Acronyms
In case you were wondering, we are still very much in the Information Age. New research conducted by professors at the University of California at Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems found that the volume of new information stored on paper, film, optical, and magnetic media doubled between 1999 and 2002. Last year alone, enough new information was generated to fill half a million libraries, each the size of the Library of Congress.
Researchers took a broad view of "new information," with phone calls accounting for the single-largest contribution. E-mail placed second, with 31 billion messages sent a year, according to IDC. But hard copy is alive and well, with a typical North American consuming 24 reams of paper a year, much of it now in the form of office documents and (snail) mail versus books, newspapers, and other publications. The volume of information stored on paper grew 36 percent between 1999 and 2002, with almost all of the increase stemming from documents produced by computer printers.
If you were to give up completely on your reading list and opt only for visual information, you'd need 2,108 years to watch every film and video title ever produced. Maybe just the radio? Last year, radio stations around the world produced 70 million hours of original programming. You could forgo consumption of any information whatsoever and commiserate via telephone with a similarly overwhelmed colleague, but your call would then contribute to the 3,785 billion minutes of phone conversation estimated to have occurred in 2002. And that's just via land lines: cell calls accounted for another 600 billion minutes.
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