Maven – Making The Organization Smaller

Recently, we wrote about how Maven is helping to make the world smaller. We believe that this same principle applies big companies: Maven makes large organizations smaller. If you think about it, worldwide enterprises like Walmart or Deloitte & Touche are almost like small countries; they have hundreds of thousands of employees spread out across vast distances. Often, employees don’t know much about their colleagues sitting across the hall, let alone in a different country (this was certainly the case for me when I worked at Deloitte & Touche and PIMCO).

Knowledge Communities powered by Maven solves this problem. Knowledge Communities brings the power of Maven’s microconsulting platform into an organization, allowing employees to identify previously untapped knowledge within their company with just the click of a mouse.

For example, Maven’s CTO, Mark Platosh, posted last week about how he wishes he had Maven when making a major ERP software decision at previous job. Finding this expertise would have been easier if Maven had existed then; moreover, if his company had implemented a Maven Knowledge Community it could have been even easier. With this capability, he would have had access to worldwide knowledge, both within his organization and beyond. In other words, the process of “asking around” within his organization to see if anyone had the knowledge he sought would have been integrated with the process of seeking external expertise. A single search of a single source means less time wasted fruitlessly knocking on colleagues’ doors. If the right person existed within his company, Maven could have quickly identified that person; if not, the rest of the world would still have been at his fingertips.

Knowledge Communities dramatically reduces the time it takes to find out if the knowledge you need already resides within your organization, effectively shrinking the company so that everyone can share and capitalize on all of the expertise available to them.