Tool lets firms pool expertise

Software vendor Autonomy has launched its Collaboration and Enterprise Networks (CEN) suite to help companies manage the expertise of their staff and to support teamwork. The firm said CEN is designed to help firms to capture, visualise and manage staff expertise, and make it available across the organisation.

With the CEN system, staff do not have to fill out forms with their details, though this approach is used by other systems, and CEN does not compile lists based on key words. Instead, it automatically generates profiles as users interact with content. In practice, this means that as each user accesses items on the company system CEN generates, or updates, that user's profile.

Tony Sheehan, head of knowledge management at civil engineering firm Ove Arup, said, "We had knowledge trapped in a lot of systems, now (with CEN) we can identify commonality across out networks."

CEN provides users with colour-coded views of expertise within the organisation, and utilises mapping tools to link users with other staff accessing similar or related material.

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