What is the KM role of the Company Experts?

In a fully developed Knowledge Management framework, the company experts have a key part to play.

The experts are one of your core stakeholder groups in KM, and your change management approach needs to explicity address these people.  For many years they may have acted as sole sources of much of the knowledge, and their personal status may be tied up with their own knowledge. KM needs to offer them a new role, which can be seen as an opportunity rather than a threat.

The technical experts in many knowledge management organisations tend to have a three-fold role:

• Acting as a source of expert opinion for others, and for the identification and development of technical practices and procedures;
• Maintaining guidelines and best practices, and validating lessons;
• Building effective learning communities.

In other words, they are accountable for:

• Developing and sharing their own tacit knowledge;
• Ownership or stewardship of the explicit knowledge in their subject matter area;
• Creation of the network that stewards the tacit knowledge in their subject matter area.