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FIFTEENTH KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT ROUNDTABLE
CONVENED ON FEBRUARY 13, 2003 AT
MITRE CORPORATION, MITRE 1 BUILDING AUDITORIUM

Resources:

Brief:

With the courtesy of MITRE Corporation, George Mason University's School of Public Policy hosted the fifteenth event in the Washington DC region's Knowledge Management Roundtable (KM RT) series at MITRE facility on February 13, 2002.

Held in conjunction with the School of Public Policy's International Center for Applied Studies in Information Technology (ICASIT) and Virginia's Center for Innovative Technology (CIT), the KM RT seeks to broaden the application and advance the effectiveness of KM practice in organizations in the region. CIT seeks to increase the Commonwealth's economic competitiveness and quality of life by advancing the development of Virginia as a technology state and by creating and retaining technology-based jobs and businesses.

As part of its efforts to achieve these results, CIT provided a grant to ICASIT to help initiate a shared KM culture among organizations in Virginia by identifying organizations interested in KM and convening the first KM Roundtable that was held in March 1999 (KM Roundtable, March 1999). Subsequently, a KM RT has been convened nearly every quarter: KM Roundtable, June 1999, KM Roundtable, September 1999, KM Roundtable, February 2000, KM Roundtable, May 2000, KM Roundtable, August 2000, KM Roundtable, November 2000, KM Roundtable, February 2001, KM Roundtable, May 2001, KM Roundtable, August 2001, KM Roundtable, November 2001, KM Roundtable, February 2002, KM Roundtable, May 2002 , and KM Roundtable, October 2002.

MEETING OVERVIEW

The Knowledge Management Roundtable sponsored an exciting program on Expertise Management, Thursday, February 13, 2003. The impressive and knowledgeable panel of speakers shared their experience with expertise systems in either government agencies or private industry. The panelists experience included systems where data is specifically generated for expert finding purposes and systems where ongoing activity is mined to support finding expertise. The panelists included:

- Raymond J. D’Amore, MITRE Corp.

- Dr. Moonja Kim, Chief, Business Process Branch, Construction Engineering Research Lab, Army Corps of Engineers

- Tom Beckman, Division CIO for Criminal Investigation, Internal Revenue Service

- Sue Hanley, Practice Executive, Dell Professional Services

- Dr. Irma Becerra Fernandez, Florida Atlantic University and National Aeronautics and Space Administration

The Speakers outlined their approaches, the business need for expert finding, and the lessons they have learned. The Knowledge Management Round Table participants were given time to ask panel members questions about their approaches.

The program began at 8:40 a.m.

Meeting Overview:

What exactly is expertise management? It could be seen as a subset of knowledge management. However, some experts contend that expertise management and knowledge management actually go hand in hand. For Instance, MITRE Corp. differentiates between knowledge—data stored in documents and data warehouses—and expertise—a more nebulous term, which describes all that is stored in the human brain. The challenge for an organization pursuing expertise management is creating a system that accurately catalogs and characterizes its employee expertise. This involves creating online directories, communities, and company surveys. Such systems first identify and then classify expertise. A possible end point for an expertise management system is helping create links between people who need expertise and those who have it.

Speakers:

- Raymond J. D’Amore, MITRE Corp.

- Dr. Moonja Kim, Chief, Business Process Branch, Construction Engineering Research Lab, Army Corps of Engineers

- Tom Beckman, Division CIO for Criminal Investigation, Internal Revenue Service

- Sue Hanley, Practice Executive, Dell Professional Services

- Dr. Irma Becerra Fernandez, Florida Atlantic University and National Aeronautics and Space Administration


Presentation 1:

Raymond J. D’Amore, MITRE Corp.

For MITRE, knowledge is data stored in documents and data warehouses. Expertise however, is more nebulous—it is “the skill of using knowledge to create something unique.” Expertise is stored in human brains and is revealed through human interactions. Expertise management is an organizational movement to categorize, inventory, assess and optimize human expertise.

As MITRE moves forward with its expertise management program, it can utilize organizational “yellow pages,” communities with designated points of contact, analyze social interaction through data mining, and workflow technologies. A MITRE Expert Finder might attach to an integrated employee database with an employee’s publications included with information about his career and education. Knowledge mapping could help support communities of practice my tracking professional interactions among workers.

Raymond J. D'Amore's Powerpoint presentation slides are available for download.

Presentation 2:

Dr. Moonja Kim, Chief, Business Process Branch, Construction Engineering Research Lab, Army Corps of Engineers

Dr. Kim’s presentation asked, “Who’s Who at CERL?” Many organizations considering expertise management programs will find themselves asking similar questions. CERL is a $100 million operation within the Army Corps of Engineers’ Engineer Research & Development Center. CERL employs over 250 scientists and engineers who study ways to maintain and improve the Army’s built infrastructure. But these scientists and engineers don’t do their work in a vacuum—customers must pay for their services. In fact, 70 percent of CERL’s budget is fee for service work. As a result, CERL has discovered it has to market the expertise of its highly technical workforce.

To help match customers with the most appropriate researchers, CERL created the P3L: the People, Product, Publication Locator, which debuted in May 2000. CERL wanted to provide customers with a single online door to its lab in addition to facilitating knowledge sharing among researchers. Furthermore, CERL wanted to eliminate redundant data calls.

CERL’s environment conservation researchers were the first to benefit from the P3L. But soon, other disciplines saw the value of the system and jumped onboard the bandwagon. CERL developed an implementation plan, which made training in the system mandatory for its in-house users.

Prospective customers can now find products and publications online. This helps link customers to the authors of those products. Personal data affiliated was eliminated from the public Web site after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The P3L supports internal CERL employees by helping link researchers with technical questions to those who have been categorized as experts in specific subjects through their published work, professional profiles, and resumes.

On the technical side, the P3L is a relatively simple system, which utilizes Microsoft Corp.’s Access database and Web services by Macromedia Inc.’s Cold Fusion.

In creating the P3L, Dr. Kim discovered that organizations must plan for the life-cycle of any knowledge management system. And, of course, management support is vital. While this tends to be a given for obtaining funds, management can also help set the tone for publicity, training, and overall organizational support and acceptance. This helps to demonstrate to users how they personally benefit from an IT system. And like most IT projects, expertise management systems need a champion.

Dr. Moonja Kim 's Powerpoint presentation slides are available for download.

Presentation 3:
Sue Hanley, Practice Executive, Dell Professional Services

Sue Hanley’s presentation detailed a major pharmaceutical company’s efforts to find ways of bringing drugs to market faster through the use of knowledge and expertise management. Aventis Pharmaceuticals, maker of the well known allergy drug Allegra, decided to look into its employees’ e-mail to discover what people were thinking about. Aventis hoped this tactic would help discover ideas in their earliest forms.

Plus, Aventis workers often discovered they couldn’t find the history of certain chemical compounds created within the company and the workers who created them. Some scientists discovered months too late that others were already working on the same or similar projects.

It appeared to be a good idea. However, Aventis is a multinational company whose scientists don’t always communicate in English. The company has offices in Japan, France, and Germany in addition to the U.S. Hanley used KMail to bridge the language gap and mine e-mails for new ideas. Dell also created an employee directory containing contact information and areas of expertise. Such directories are good first steps in linking like minds in communities or helping information seekers find relevant experts.

Hanley discovered three vital lessons while assembling Aventis’ expertise management system. First, some people may not want their expertise made public—even within their organizations. Second, others don not want to admit they do not know something. Third, many managers perceive that they are gateways of information within their organization. Hanley found this behavior had to be modified.

Finally, Hanley discovered that scientists took little issue with the company looking into their e-mail. However, the IT staff did have some problems with privacy.

Sue Hanley 's Powerpoint presentation slides are available for download.

Presentation 4:
Dr. Irma Becerra-Fernandez, Florida Atlantic University and National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Dr. Becerra-Fernadez’s presentation explained how NASA is using expert locator systems, specifically ExpertSeeker and Sage.

Expert Seeker, currently in use at the Kennedy Space Center and the Goddard Space Flight Center, “aims to help locate intellectual capital” at the two centers. This helps employees access competencies within the organizations, offers experts more visibility, and could be a base for competency gap analysis in the future. The system also catalogs knowledge competencies.

In creating the system, NASA was searching for a way to accurately catalog expertise. Dr. Becerra-Fernandez found that most expertise management systems relied on self assessments. This format has both advantages and disadvantages. It does allow organizations to build a repository of competencies. However, the information provided is subjective. In other words, information collected this way is tainted by employees’ own perceptions of their skills. Such information can be inaccurate due to exaggeration of abilities. But there is also a flip side: some workers attempt to skew their skills in order to avoid serving as internal consultants. Expert Seeker utilizes data mining to eliminate these problems. Expert Seeker uses published reports to characterize expertise.

Dr. Irma Becerra-Fernandez 's Powerpoint presentation slides are available for download.

Presentation 5:
Tom Beckman, Division CIO for Criminal Investigation, Internal Revenue Service

Tom Beckman’s presentation did a good job outlining what knowledge and expertise are and where they can be found. According to the Beckman, knowledge is reasoning about information in context to actively guide task performance, problem solving, and decision making in order to manage, improve, learn, and teach. Knowledge management is the formalization of, access to, and use of experience, knowledge, and expertise to create new capabilities, enable superior performance, encourage innovation, and enhance customer value. Expertise management is creating processes so that employees can connect and collaborate with colleagues for answers, expertise, or insight.

Beckman breaks knowledge into three categories: explicit or formal knowledge, which includes text (documents, e-mails, web sites, and news feeds), data (accounting, customer relationship management data, and knowledge repositories), applications (transactional, performance support systems, and expert systems), research and analysis tools (search engines, data and text mining, visualization, and simulation); implicit or social knowledge, which includes communication, collaboration, teamwork, communities, and help desks; and finally tacit or embedded knowledge, which includes personal experience, values, beliefs, cultural norms, values, beliefs, and symbols.

While some of this has been characterized as expertise by other presenters, his accumulation of knowledge sources is instructional. Where Dr. Becerra-Fernandez identified problems with self-surveys, Beckman proposes peer- or manager-surveys to identify who an organizations experts are and what they know.

Tom Beckman 's Powerpoint presentation slides are available for download.

Q&A Session:

The first question asked how expertise management can help with retirements, a looming problem for the federal government. Beckman said organizations should do their best to capture relevant knowledge and expertise before the individual walks out the door forever. Beckman asked whether organizations even bothered to perform exit interviews or even create lessons learned documents at the end of careers and or projects. As one might expect, Beckman strongly advocates such activities.

Dr. Becerra –Fernandez said that expertise management systems that consider expertise not found in one’s organization can help alleviate the problems of retirements—and could keep such expertise on call if need be. At MITRE, retirements are mitigated by a conscious effort to create “knowledge redundancy.”

The second question focused on scarce resources and about how difficult it is to measure the effectiveness of knowledge management programs. One presenter said that it is important to measure business results and not waste time trying to evaluate the effectiveness of the knowledge management project itself.

Finally, the issue of custom applications versus COTS was raised. The presenters agreed that the K/EM space is maturing and that the tool suites available are more comprehensive. However, there was some rumbling about the government having to pay for the same software multiple times if used by multiple agencies. One presenter urged agencies to engage in government to government software sharing agreements to help mitigate this problem.

The meeting adjourned at 12 noon.

Our thanks are extended to MITRE Corporation for hosting the Expertise Management KMRT and to Joshua Dean for recording the minutes of the meeting.

Clay

J. Clay Dean, P.E.
Chairman of the Knowledge Management Roundtable and
Senior Consultant for Knowledge Management
International Center for Applied Studies in Information Technology
School of Public Policy, George Mason University
703/644 7867
jdean1210@cox.net

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