One of the most valuable assets of any large organization is the enormous combined expertise of its employees. However, it's not always easy to access this valuable resource. If one employee faces a problem he can't solve, there's a good chance that there's someone else in the organization who has dealt with the same problem many times before and can provide a quick answer. But how does one find this person among thousands of people? Nuon, currently the largest Dutch energy supplier, was facing exactly this problem.
Commissioned by iFonti, Liquid Earth developed a solution that presents the available expertise within the company as a virtual expertise map. Using a standard web browser, users can quickly navigate through a large number of topics and instantly get an idea of how many experts there are in certain fields as well as the level of their expertise. This allows users to quickly locate and contact the right expert.
This solution, named Xperts, also stores referrals from one employee to another in case the person initially contacted doesn't have the answer himself. This way the existing human networks within the company are leveraged to make expertise more accessible. After all, in most cases it's very likely that you can be linked to the person who has a solution through one or two colleagues.