Today I am writing more about this self-tagging vs peer tagging thing, because I think there is a balance to be had between the two models.
IBM has in their organization a system for expert location that I imagine many companies have, the giant staff lookup that includes tags designating expertise. The traditional staff directory is not new - thats been around in paper format since the dawn of the industrial age. But IBM being well - Big Blue, has added an expert tagging and context aspect to their staff directory that ecxceeds the average staff lookup system. Called IBM Bluepages (aka Fringe Contacts), users can view that person’s reporting chain (who they report to and their boss’s boss and so on, all the way up to the CEO), their peers, and the person’s direct reports. The system also provides duel tagging - self tagging, and 'corporate' tagging. Here’s a screenshot. (props to Library Clips, my source for this).
A good system has both - a Peer Tagging/Reputation system AND a self-tagging system.
The trick to making all this metadata work though, is to overcome the maxim "People are Lazy". The only thing that makes an expertise system (such as IBM's Fringe Contacts) valuable is currency.
At my last company we had a similar system. It was a home grown application that ran inside of our coporate intranet and was connected to the staffing system. It would designate what percentage of your time was devoted to what projects, What the project team was, who reported to who, and what internal teams supported the work. It also included tags for the technologies on the projects, linked those to the ones you were working with in your job function, and had a separate section for you to 'self tag'. Every three months, or every time you changed a project, you had to go into the system and update your expertise tags (and you got a really annoying nag email every day until you did). The expert tags worked a lot like Monster.com resume submission - you listed the technology or expertise area, years of experience with the technology, level of expertise, and last time you "used" that technology. Every time your staffing assignment changed (even if it was from one task team to another in the same project) your profile was updated on the project. It was both authoritative, and augmented by additional self-tags.
The context of this was great - at one point I joined a project team of a system that had evolved as a project over the past 5 years. It was my job to update and enhance legacy code for the application. By going into our staffing system, I learned that there was someone in the LA office still with the company who had been the lead developer on the project. I reached out an made a connection - which led to some hidden documentation and a great brain to pick anytime I needed to ask "Now why would the developers have chosen to do it that way?"
The system was also great for finding that hidden expertise in companies. Often times, companies act as though your expertise only began when you walked in the door and became an Acme, Inc employee. Of course - this is rarely true! Most people have a varied background, and just because you are no longer working in a certain area means you lost your expertise in it. Once upon a time I was a Perl Guru, and since I was tagged in the expert system as such I even got the occasional Perl question from random developers in the office who could see that while I wasn't the most current Perl expert, I WAS sitting just down the hall... Which is probably one of the more insidious problems in companies today: How to find the expert next door.
Continuing my praise for the self tag - something used most on the resumes, in the list of keywords and skills we all write up about ourselves. This of course has its limits, because people lie, abbreviate, and neglect their resumes. That too falls under the metadata trap of people lying. I don't mean people are all evil - I've 'lied' on my resume. No, I didn't make up degrees I didn't have. I left things off. On purpose! At a certain point in your career, everyone falls into this trap - My internship as a recieving clerk in a deparment store has little relevance to my career as a technology consultant. And I do in fact know a little PL/SQL. But ask me to leverage either of those expertises and I will deny, deny, deny to know them! Fortunately, this is a acceptable white lie, and an interesting quandry system for expertise location. Peer tagging is good, but self tagging creates the chance to "opt out".
So now, in my dreams I'm wishing for a mashup of Fringe Contacts and Qunu...
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