ZDNet wrote up a nice review of Wolfram/Alpha's demo of their new search engine at Harvard recently.
The demo was webcast and a recording can be found here.
What's it mean for HR and talent management? A lot, I think. One of the next big moves as far as talent management technology goes – a move that has already begun – revolves around the ability to easily identify experts/expertise within the enterprise. It's the confluence of knowledge and talent management via the recongition that PEOPLE and not documents are the primary keepers of knowledge in our companies.
Most vendors are currently approaching this through profile searches, which is valuable but limited in its power and usefulness.
The Wolfram/Alpha search engine on the other hand, and other tools like it, could find some unique applications in our companies as means by which to much more comprehensively aggregate and present expertise to searchers. Depending on what it is allowed to crawl (Is email off-limits? How about phone conversations?), these tools could become very powerful means for serving up social links and just-in-time knowledge on the proverbial silver platter.
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