Take your typical collaborative effort, strip away all the software gadgetry, business processes, and communications devices, and what's left? People--the essential ingredient for any collaboration. Many companies are leveraging those human resources with expertise-management tools.

This emerging software does two things: It distills company knowledge down to its most vital assets, and it creates a method for letting employees locate and connect with a company's most knowledgeable subject-matter experts. A handful of vendors specialize in this area, including Cadenza Inc. and Kamoon Inc., while some collaboration vendors have built expertise-management capabilities into their products.

Expertise management is essential to Sinclair Knight Merz Group, an Australian professional-services consulting firm. With 3,000 employees spread among 35 offices, collaborating would be impossible if employees didn't have an effective way to find one another.

Sinclair consultants in Australia, Great Britain, Ireland, and Malaysia have been working together on the design and construction of a light-rail system planned in Dublin, Ireland. They found each other by using a knowledge repository the company created 14 months ago, with OpenText Corp.'s LiveLink collaboration software, to determine what experts within the company could contribute significantly to the project. The repository, which Sinclair calls the Worldwide Information Sharing Environment, or Wise, also serves as a project management-collaboration environment, complete with document workflows and tools for building Web-based workspaces that are shared with clients.

"The company as it exists now couldn't have existed five years ago because of the advantages of the toolsets available today," says Peter Nevin, group information systems manager. "The way people find each other is highly electronic."

To make finding experts even easier, Sinclair is planning to build a formal process for bringing the most valuable knowledge from a given project to the forefront of the knowledge repository, then linking consultants to the expert behind that knowledge. The company also is developing communities of practice that will bring subject experts together and let them branch off into project communities, where they can lend their expertise to a project in need. That's where an expert's knowledge gains demonstrable value. Nevin says, "Our expertise lies in the results of the work we do."