November 8, 1999

System Tracks Employees' Changing Skills
KnowledgeMail creates and updates knowledge directories by monitoring E-mail messages

By Rick Whiting

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acit Knowledge Systems Inc. last week unveiled KnowledgeMail, a system that creates and maintains profiles of employees and their areas of expertise, as revealed by their E-mail messages.

KnowledgeMail automates the profile-creation process by capturing outbound E-mail messages, extracting key words, and using those terms to build or update employee profiles. Knowledge-management projects often include "knowledge directories" that provide detailed descriptions of employees' areas of expertise. Such directories let managers and workers identify employees with specific skills, but these directories need constant updating.

Last year, Texaco Inc. built such a system containing profiles of about 1,500 employees. But keeping the profiles updated has been difficult, says Ed McDonald, who helped direct the company's knowledge-management efforts. "We have found them to be very static systems, and we live in a very dynamic world," he says.

To eliminate this hurdle, KnowledgeMail groups key E-mail words into categories and uses them to create private profiles of employees. Using employee-approved terms from the private profile, the software builds a public profile that is made available across company intranets. The system does not retain the captured E-mail messages. Other company employees can search the public profiles using keywords to find people with expertise that matches their needs.

KnowledgeMail and KnowledgeMail Plus are expected to be available later this month, priced on a per-profile basis. The first release will support the Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes E-mail systems.

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