From Anecdote to Economic Model: Building the Case for Enterprise Expertise Location.

About the Client

Company Z is a global pharmaceutical manufacturer. Company Z’s manufacturing division oversees the formulation, packaging, and distribution of its global product portfolio across an interdependent manufacturing network. In the early 2020s, Company Z’s Knowledge Management Center of Excellence was pursuing several parallel initiatives to modernize how the division’s scientists and engineers find content and each other. This expertise location business case was one of those workstreams.

Industry Context

Gartner defines expertise location as identifying human expertise, determining the status of that resource, and integrating the person or expertise into the interaction process — in practice, an inventory of skills, geographic locations, availability, and other parameters relevant to using that expertise. The challenge is especially acute in life sciences manufacturing, where valuable knowledge is technical, tacit, and unevenly distributed across a large global workforce. As a result, the person best equipped to solve a given problem may be in a different function or country than the person searching. Off-the-shelf tools built for this purpose have a well-documented history of poor adoption: Microsoft’s own Delve, one of the two systems Iknow evaluated in this engagement, was ultimately retired industry-wide in December 2024 after years of limited traction. This reinforces that fixing expertise location takes more than deploying a tool — it requires data structures and taxonomies that reflect how a specific workforce actually searches for expertise.

Current Situation

Company Z’s KM COE Team had many examples of subject-matter experts found through personal networks, but lacked a definitive business case to justify investing in standardized processes and systems. Company Z’s existing systems, Delve and Workday, were plagued with problems: they lacked the data structures typically used to search for experts; their skills and competencies weren’t aligned with Company Z’s scientific and engineering terminology or enterprise search taxonomy; and rollout had been so poor that the systems held profiles for less than 15% of the workforce. Company Z’s KM COE asked Iknow to capture detailed use cases on searching for experts and to develop a business case for improving expertise location processes and tools.

• No formal business case despite a clear anecdotal need. Company Z’s KM COE could cite many individual examples of expert-finding via personal networks, but had nothing rigorous enough to justify further investment.
• Systems present but functionally absent. Delve and Workday existed, but their data structures didn’t align with how employees actually searched for experts, and their skills and competencies weren’t aligned with Company Z’s scientific and engineering terminology.
• Near-total rollout failure. The existing profile systems covered less than 15% of the workforce, so even a technically sound search tool would have had almost nothing to search.
• A need for evidence rigorous enough to win investment. Building a defensible business case meant translating faster expert-finding into believable economic value, not just better anecdotes.

• Capture detailed, real-world use cases that describe how Company Z employees search for and use expertise.
• Develop a model to estimate the business value of improved expertise location.
• Analyze Company Z’s existing expertise-related systems, Microsoft Delve and Workday, to identify current gaps.
• Deliver a robust, evidence-based business case to support further investment in expertise location processes and tools.

How Iknow Structured the Work

Iknow built the business case in layers: structured interviews to surface real use cases, synthesis of those use cases into validated patterns and sources of value, an economic model translating those patterns into dollars, and supporting analyses to ground the recommendations in Company Z’s actual systems and workforce.

Key Activities & Decisions

• Stakeholder interviews. Iknow conducted 16 interviews with employees across Company Z’s business functions and departments, preparing written summaries that captured insights from each conversation.
• Use case synthesis. The 16 interviews yielded 22 use case scenarios describing instances in which employees used personal networks to accomplish a defined goal or task. Iknow validated these into nine use case types organized into four groups: getting an answer to an administrative question, performing core job-related tasks, finding a person to perform core job-related tasks, and analyzing Company Z’s workforce.
• Sources of value. Iknow identified five primary sources of business value from expertise location: reduced problem-solving cycle time, higher-quality outputs, increased innovation, reduced information overload, and support for professional development.
• Economic value model. Iknow developed a model estimating the value of expertise location to the Division based on shortened business problem-solving cycle times, as a function of problem complexity — well-structured versus ill-structured problems — and the size of the impact on a project team’s progress.
• Systems analysis. Iknow analyzed Company Z’s existing Microsoft Delve and Workday employee-profile data to document the current-state gaps underlying poor search results.
• Persona development. Iknow developed eight employee personas to ground the use cases and recommendations in representative user types across Company Z.

Stakeholders & Collaboration

Iknow served as prime contractor, working directly with Company Z’s KM COE Team and interviewing employees across Company Z’s business functions and departments. The engagement ran alongside other Iknow workstreams for Company Z’s KM COE, reflecting the Center’s broader push to modernize knowledge management at the time.

Turning Scattered Anecdotes into Rigorous Evidence

Company Z’s KM COE had many individual stories about expert-finding but lacked a structured foundation for an investment decision. Iknow addressed this by systematically interviewing 16 employees across functions and synthesizing their input into 22 documented use-case scenarios and nine validated use-case types — converting anecdotal impressions into a structured, defensible dataset.

Making the Value of Faster Expert-Finding Tangible

A business case based solely on qualitative claims about better collaboration would not have justified new investment. Iknow addressed this by building a value model tied directly to a measurable outcome — shortened problem-solving cycle time, weighted by problem complexity and project impact — so the business case rested on an economic estimate rather than a collection of testimonials.

Quantitative Outcomes

• Stakeholder interviews: 16 employees across Company Z’s business functions and departments.
• Use cases documented: 22 real-world use cases, validated and grouped into nine use case types across four groups.
• Personas developed: eight employee personas that grounded the analysis in representative user types.
• Baseline system coverage: fewer than 15% of the workforce held profiles in Company Z’s existing Delve and Workday systems — the gap the business case had to overcome.

Qualitative Outcomes

Iknow’s economic model demonstrated a significant business benefit, providing Company Z’s KM COE with the rigorous, defensible business case it had lacked. Based on those findings, Company Z approved and allocated additional funding for subsequent expertise location work — a concrete organizational commitment rather than a shelved recommendation. The underlying diagnosis also proved durable: years later, Microsoft’s own Delve was retired industry-wide after struggling with the very adoption and alignment issues that Company Z’s KM COE had already identified in its own environment.

Timeline to Impact

Iknow delivered the use case research, systems analysis, personas, and business case within the four-month contracted period, with Company Z’s funding decision for subsequent work following directly from these findings.

Core Skills

• Expertise location strategy
• Use case research & synthesis
• Business case & value modeling
• Employee persona development

Methods & Frameworks

• Structured stakeholder interviews
• Use case scenario analysis
• Economic value modeling (problem-solving cycle time)
• Persona development

Technologies & Tools

• Microsoft Delve and Workday employee-profile data analysis