Expertise Directory

When I joined the Asia Pacific region of a consulting firm, the consulting practices were then very new, expertise in the different lines of business or industry sectors wasn’t very well developed. But there was a lot of pressure to build up those practices – we needed to capitalize on expertise in order to build our market and revenue. The KM group identified particular kinds of expertise by business lines and industry sector, we documented it and put it online. If there was a market opportunity, you could refer to a list and draw on them for help in developing a proposal – they were often in Australia, so we would fly them out to meet the client in the bids. We got a lot of work this way. Some people nominated themselves for the expertise directory, or we found them through examples of client work, publications or recognition by peers. The biggest challenge was getting their time – taking people away from their normal job to contribute to somebody else’s practice, so we put in place a recognition scheme.