Expertise Management for Professional Services

Understanding Expertise Management

Expertise management is a strategic practice within knowledge management that focuses specifically on the knowledge sales, marketing, and business development required to win new business. It is the systematic process of capturing, organizing, and leveraging the collective knowledge and expertise gained from past projects, client engagements, and experiences within the organization.

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By ensuring you have the data needed to clearly communicate your firm's experience and the unique skills of your people right at your fingertips, expertise management creates invaluable efficiencies and business value.

The Core Process of Expertise Management

Creating business value that flows through the entire organization requires a systematic approach. The foundational steps include:

• Data collection: Expertise management starts with collecting data on all past projects, client interactions, and engagements. This includes details like project scopes, outcomes, client feedback, team members involved, and any unique challenges or solutions implemented.

• Centralized knowledge repository: The collected data is stored in a centralized knowledge repository or database. This repository should be easily accessible and searchable by team members, allowing them to retrieve relevant information quickly.

• Tagging and categorization: To make information retrieval efficient, experiences are typically tagged, categorized, and indexed based on various criteria such as industry, client, service type, location and project size.

Empowering Your Most Valuable Asset: People

Every firm aims to optimize its operations by breaking down silos of information to unlock the potential of its most valuable asset: people. However, it is common for information to be disaggregated across siloed systems, creating an operational burden. When the discovery of the firm's own people becomes cumbersome, the business value of that expertise is squandered.

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To differentiate in an intensely competitive market, firms must eliminate this unnecessary burden on their workforce and create seamless access to the firm's expertise.

Business-Critical Solutions Driven by Expertise Data

With expertise data centralized, firms enjoy surgically efficient and accurate outputs through several key features that help drive growth and productivity:

• CV Automation: This radically simplifies the search for accurate CVs and resumes. It enables very large packages of perfectly consistent, branded CVs to be instantly downloaded and exported to standard bid formats like World Bank, US Standard Form 220, and European Curriculum Vitae.

• Expertise Matrices: The relevant experience and competency levels of professionals are centralized into deeply detailed taxonomies, simplifying search to a few clicks. Users can create customized profiles targeted to fulfill specific circumstances and export up-to-date profiles in just one click.

• Proposal Generation: This streamlines the creation of proposals, saving time and resources while ensuring a consistent format, tone, and messaging. With pre-built templates and content libraries, firms can respond to client requests more quickly, gaining a competitive advantage.

• Availability: This helps firms ensure the productivity of their experts by knowing in an instant who is available, their competencies, and their interests. Leadership receives weekly reports providing insight into the total bench and areas of expertise available.

Real-World Impact: Global Design Firm Case Study

A global collective of designers, engineering, and sustainability consultants with over 18,000 professionals across 140 countries sought to evolve their global directory. They faced major challenges, including out-of-date CVs, manual update processes, and antiquated, siloed systems that prevented the discovery of experts. Locating CVs for inclusion in bids was difficult, and searching by expertise was not possible.

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The firm deployed ikaun's Employee Profile and CV automation platform to integrate their multiple data sources into a central hub. As part of the solution, ikaun imported approximately 7,000 existing Word-based CVs and retired two legacy systems. This centralized system enabled bid preparers to easily locate professionals by expertise, package CVs together, and quickly generate Word documents, significantly reducing the time spent creating bids. Upon going live, leadership praised the platform, noting the potential for huge ROI, reduced effort, and increased quality in their bid processes.