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It’s a Small World After All

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For my first solo Blog entry it’s fitting that I use a title that gives nod to a Disney ride. This is John Hand from the KN team and for those who know me or view my shared keywords, you can see that asking me about anything Disney is a great way to get me talking. Even so, I often feel pressured to create better and faster business solutions in a world filled with increased demands – and I know I’m not alone. Many of us often either have to find an expert quickly (very small chance) and hope the expert is available (small chance on top of very small chance) to provide input or we just wing it! It is no wonder why so many of us “just wing it” 99.99% of the time. (Okay, okay – you may be saying, “Speak for yourself Johnny boy.”) Most of us don’t have the luxury of time or available resources to do it any other way and still get the job done on time at the quality level required.

In a May 15th Wall Street Journalreport Managing: Making Use of Worker Know-How -- Software Lets Firms Mine Staff Expertise, Trim Costs and Effort Michael Totty quotes Erica Driver, a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research who states “Expertise location is a really hard thing to do. But the payoff can be huge." Welcome to the wonderful world of KN whereby you can easily discover needed expertise within and outside of your corporation—it is all but a query away.

           

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point Malcolm talks about how 150 relationships is about the maximum number of relationships one person can remember. Yet when the internal KI (the code name for Knowledge Network was Knowledge Interchange) pilot usage reached just 814 people, the network included over 100,000 external contacts alone. So even if you could keep tabs on 150 relationships do you know truly what they are currently working on or what they’ve done in the past? Wouldn’t it be nice if prior to ringing up an old colleague you could see what she is currently working on and what keywords you share in common with her or better yet, find the person in your organization who has the strongest relationship with a third-party you are trying to reach? These benefits are just the tip of the iceberg when you tap in to the power of KN. So for those Disney fanatics out there (and you know who you are!) when you start using KN, you too will realize that it truly is a small world after all.

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