Finding Subject Matter Experts

A Subject Matter Expert, or SME, within any organization is a person who has specific and relevant knowledge about how that company operates. They have unique and valuable expertise in one or more areas of the company and are especially knowledgeable on processes and technology used in their day-to-day job role. A SME is usually able to provide support and advocacy for the end-users across their business unit.

A common challenge within every organization is finding SME’s for a specific job requirement or new project in a timely manner. These resources are only known through work experience and tribal knowledge within the company and there is rarely a central directory that outlines these resources and their areas of expertise. Especially in large organizations with a distributed workforce, it is a time-consuming struggle for new employees to find people with specific, job related skillsets required for assistance and knowledge transfer.

Employees spend too much time searching for information they need or looking for the SME’s who have the tacit knowledge. How much time? According to a McKinsey report, employees spend 1.8 hours every day — 9.3 hours per week, on average—searching and gathering information. Put another way, businesses hire 5 employees but only 4 show up to work; the fifth is off searching for answers, but not contributing any value.

What if there were a simple way for employees to keep a personal listing of their own expertise and skills updated and made available for other employees to find them? What if employees could add ratings to the skills profiles of each other and promote them for additional categories of expertise? Today that model is a possibility. The collaboration platform capabilities of Microsoft Teams make this possible through a new native application that can be installed within minutes and easily adopted by employees familiar with Teams.

With the new Advanced Client Experience (ACE) solution from panagenda, employees can easily find the SME resources they need, and contact them directly through their on-line profile in Teams. Each user maintains their own skills inventory and includes other areas of interest, experience levels and additional useful items such as office location and languages spoken. This information is indexed centrally and made available through a simple search interface within the ACE application.

User Profile Example:

Skills & Expertise Search Example:

A solution like OfficeExpert ACE can greatly reduce the time lost searching for information and expertise and return it to employee productivity. Information workers can tap into the entire knowledge pool within their organization to quickly and easily find the most qualified candidates to help them on projects or provide the answers they need. Their lives just got a whole lot easier thanks to OfficeExpert ACE.