Expertise Management using Cogenz
Published by Niall Cook July 16th, 2006 in Cogenz, Expertise managementOne of the major benefits that comes from using an enterprise bookmarking tool like Cogenz (as opposed to just using a publicly-available social bookmarking tool) is the ability to locate expertise within your organisation.
In large organisations in particular, finding someone who knows about a specific topic can be extremely difficult. Cogenz offers a few ways to make this easier:
1. Locating Experts (and Alternatives)
In Cogenz, it is relatively easy to find experts based on the tags they use. The assumption is that people who frequently use the “enterprise bookmarking” tag, for example, have an interest in (and therefore some knowledge of) the topic. Here are the users on our beta system who are identified as being related to this particular tag:
Therefore, if I was looking for someone in my organisation who could help me understand enterprise bookmarking, I’d be looking these two up.
2. Identifying Communities of Interest
Alternatively, if I am looking to find people across my organisation who share the same interests or knowledge as me (and therefore people I’d want to connect and share information with), I can simply go to my own page on Cogenz and see who my related users are:
3. Expertise Mapping
The two examples above are useful for individual employees to locate experts in particular field, or those who share their own interests, but what if you’d like to map the expertise within your company?
In that case, it’s a relatively simple process to extract all the connections from Cogenz to visualise both a) the connections between individuals and b) the connections between topics and experts.
Using social network analysis techniques, these can then be charted:
So there you have it. A very simple introduction to how companies can use Cogenz to locate and visualise experts and their relationships.
PS. If you want to read more about expertise management, I highly recommend you read Dennis D. McDonald’s and Luis Suarez’s thoughts on the topic (disclosure: both have been invited to beta test Cogenz).
10 Responses to “Expertise Management using Cogenz”
- 1 Trackback on Jul 21st, 2006 at 4:44 am
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Congrats on the launch of Cogenz.
I like your approach to identify best or alternative experts based on the social tagging that would occur within the enterprise. The ability to leverage user-generated tags to identify and align people with a common interest and passion will enable user and business unit productivity gains.
Does Cogenz enable the ability for the user to “self-declare” tags of identity in addition to tagging items of interest. Said differently, could I self-describe my area of expertise using an enterprise specific taxonomy in addition to my social tagging folksonomy?
Bruce,
Thanks for the congratulations, and sorry for the long delay in replying. The answer is “yes” - Cogenz allows users to add what we call account tags to their profiles. If I therefore wanted to see or subscribe to the items of just those users who have tagged themselves “marketing”, for example.
Niall
Niall - will you very kindly explain “Account Tags” a little more fully? Thanks.
Tom,
Account tags are simply words that users of Cogenz can associate with their profiles. So if I work as an online marketing manager in the marketing department of a global company in Paris, I might choose the account tags “online”, “marketing” and “paris”.
If other people choose the same tags as me, then Cogenz makes it very easy for me to a) find and connect with those people, and b) view and subscribe to all the bookmarks from people with a specific account tag.
Does that help?
Yes, that explains it quite clearly — an excellent idea, as well! Thanks.
Hi Niall,
I was wondering if you have any specific model for evaluating/determining expertise given tagged data in the enterprise.
Thanks,
Shreeharsh
Shreeharsh,
No specific models at the moment, but we are currently building some rather exciting tools into Cogenz that would go some way towards providing such a model.