ABSTRACT
Picture this: a business unit (BU) of a large, global manufacturing conglomerate realizes that internal research being conducted around the world is unknown to many who could use it; voice of the customer (VOC) is collected but not shared widely; and critical knowledge resides in the heads of their experts, with no way to capture and disseminate it easily. In short, they didn’t know what they didn’t know. Let us call this company HI Corporation. As a knowledge-based organization, whose key competitive advantage is its intellectual capital and the expertise of its employees, they were not managing their knowledge to their advantage. This led to duplication of efforts, repeating mistakes, and excessive time searching for information. The result was lower quality, productivity, and efficiency. This chapter
24.1 Introduction 285 24.2 Global Manufacturer’s Expertise Locator System 286 24.3 Is Locating Experts the Silver Bullet? 288 24.4 Challenges 291
24.4.1 Lessons Learned 292 24.4.2 Culture Effect 293
24.5 Conclusion 295
describes the case of how key intellectual capital was unlocked and made available globally through several intuition-based decisions.
