Building knowledge sharing communities using team expertise access maps

It is difficult for large and geographically dispersed organisations to manage personal knowledge for easy discovery and sharing, especially in the areas of identification, indexing and codification of the knowledge held in people’s heads and the cultural issues of discovery, mutual trust and sharing. We have prototyped a methodology based on mind mapping and a relational database to codify, index and map staff knowledge. This includes an interview process to build trust while eliciting career histories, plus a relationally based 280 S. Nousala et al. graphical knowledge retrieval structure making it easy for other staff to determine who is likely to posses the kind of knowledge needed.