On Wednesday May 5 1999, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Abuzz Inc will announce its Beehive expertise management software, designed to extract the knowledge from the heads of knowledge workers. Beehive is an intelligent email router which intercepts natural language queries, parses them and directs them to the most appropriate expert. While the software needs to be seeded with some sort of skills database, it quickly outgrows that seed by learning and adapting to user responses. Participants are rated on the quality and quantity of their responses to Beehive email.

Managers are likely to fall on Beehive with glad cries. It lets them track exactly what their charges are working on, in real time. Even better from their point of view, it identifies non- contributors, though arguably by so arbitrary a metric as to be meaningless. That’s unlikely to prevent it being used in employee appraisals, of course. Executive VP John Rizzi says that the software is best received in companies that are already in the business of micromanaging their employees: consulting and professional services firms, advertising outfits and the like.

Workers themselves may be less than thrilled. Privacy protection is not exactly Abuzz’s top priority: When we put Beehive into a company we let them know that they shouldn’t put just anything into it, Rizzi says. We tell them to post what you wouldn’t be embarrassed to see hanging on the fridge in the tea room. He admits that there are legal issues connected with the use of the software in Europe, where the compilation and use of a database of employee skill-sets might be frowned upon if not actually considered illegal.

Rizzi says people should not be afraid of Beehive, and claims that when they use it, many start to like it. But in the final analysis he has no sympathy for the sorts of diehard eggheads who conceal their contact details in an effort to discourage questions from clueless newbies. That’s not very good corporate citizenship, is it? he concludes. Maybe not, but some might say it’s an equally valid way of getting the job done. รก