Yellowpages
The vision goes beyond finding people with specific skills and competencies, to helping groups learn more about their members, their individual desires, preferences, their connections & relationships to the marketplace and their inner interests and drivers.
A group or community where the members know each other well, is able to leverage opportunity and learn faster, does a better job of information filtering and recognizing opportunity, is able to 'translate' and improve the understanding for individuals and has greater trust. Such groups are able to access their intuitive knowledge of how members will react, form more cohesive sub-groups and teams and will find alignment is easier to achieve.
When co-workers know your expertise and preferences, they are able to draw upon it when needed, helping rapid alignment and speeding self-organization. Shared tacit knowledge formed in a community through conversation and dialog is a very valuable corporate resource, well-protected from competitors, impossible to copy and requires special conditions to replicate elsewhere.
The knowledge advantage is: a sensitivity for social capital, unique competency in fostering social engagement, building collaborative communities, setting the climate and the conditions for deep personal knowledge sharing. Experience with structured databases, automatic profiling, psychographics and finely developed skills in hosting, building trust, seeding conversations and leading through example will be valuable here.
Appreciation for the key role of identity, rituals for helping groups to open-up, empathy for reticent participants and incentives for open frank disclosure help to keep the directory alive.
Reflections
Conversations over content:
Concentrate on assisting feedback, comments and questions rather than static content. The really interesting aspects always emerge from conversations around shared interests rather than from a catalog of a person's skills. Design to foster dialog and encourage exploration, thus keeping the repository 'alive', active and updated.
Relationships over competencies:
A more valuable entry is people you know (and who & what they know) rather than things you can do. Why?, your skills are context, time and community dependent, relationships integrate access, allow the flow of knowledge and give access to people who keep knowledge active & alive.
Annotate all objects / documents with people links:
I have seen excellent yellowpages that go unused because everyday documents, objects, e-mail and bulletin board posts do not point to people, so the essential link and context for using the yellowpages (the driver!) was missing from the workplace. A yellowpages repository is only one part of the system, the other part is creating the 'pull' to get people to use the resource.
Individual freedom over strict format:
Capture the creative spirit and the individual context by allowing maximum personal freedom over design. It is impossible to predict what will spark the contact points between individuals. Spend money on the best indexing & search engine you can afford but keep this in the background. Forcing everyone to fit into a rigid classification scheme and to choose their terms from a limited list, stifles the emergence of subtle hooks and reduces motivation to keep the repository updated, it becomes a task rather than a personal expression with pride of ownership.
Updating is key:
Yellowpages that 'get behind', where the individual entries and the contact information is out-of-date build a negative spiral. It only takes one visit to turn a new user off!. Put your energies on keeping interest alive. I have found making at least an annual review is essential. One way is to require a formal review of yellowpages as part of the review process for promotion and merit assessment.
Use tools that help updating:
Tools that help with collecting personal profiles are useful and key to helping with updating. I do not think these can be used without personal review and fine-tuning, but they sure help to highlight new interests and acquired relationships & skills e.g. Autonomy, Tacit, Orbital, Abuzz, Netperceptions. The reality is people forget!, they need to be reminded of what they did, what they learnt, and who they have interacted with.
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