This is amazingly like the reviews we may get from customers, if we offered customers a means to evaluate our performance, and supports the concept that even within the business, we are supporting ' customers' for our expertise, and we should be willing to be evaluated relative to our perceived performance. On the other hand, a collective Big Brother, whose ten thousand eyes are watching and rating every e-mail response you send out, is not necessarily a liberating and humane vision of the future. As citizens of the new corporate order, we may need to take civics lessons very much to heart if these new virtual distributed meritocracies are to work. The more geographically dispersed a company is, the more important it is to consider expertise profiling. There's one other factor to consider, a reason to downplay the importance of this kind of development.
Some companies have a natural knack for broadcasting knowledge of who knows what.
Most of these do not have facilities organized strictly by department, mixing functions physically together in a way that promotes the kind of transmission that occurs naturally in an entrepreneurial, small business. A business can also boost this ability with certain events. Some companies, like 3M, used to have knowledge fairs, kind of like junior-high science fairs, where people have booths to show off different skills or inventions they have that might benefit other company efforts. These public shows can broadcast a wide set of knowledge about who knows what. At the same time, businesses have a strong incentive to know who knows what, and to apply the best cognitive abilities available to problems at hand.