Banking on expertise sharing

Providing sound financial advice requires more than a list of what's hot and what's not in the stock market. High-quality service hinges on having the right expertise and information instantly available.

The Investment Banking Division of Morgan Stanley, which serves individual and institutional investors and investment banking clients, is implementing expertise sharing and relationship networking software to ensure it has an up-to-the-minute picture of what's happening. The division has licensed ActiveNet software from Tacit.

"We have been piloting ActiveNet since its beta stage to help our staff to locate and share expertise," says Stephen Sparkes, CIO of the Investment Banking Division. "We decided to deploy the software to our whole organization because of the new 'who knows who' capability in the latest release. This effortlessly keeps our team up-to-date with the organization's external relationships. That helps Morgan Stanley to collect timely and relevant information to improve service for our clients while observing our stringent privacy needs."

The "who knows who" relationship service allows employees to search for peers who have existing business relationships with target companies or specific individuals within a target company.

The solution uses automated profiling technology to continuously discover information about the work focus, expertise and relationships of each person in an organization. Users can find and collaborate with the right colleagues, helping the work force to operate as effectively as possible, according to Tacit. The software continuously looks for new people and information on any topic and integrates with existing systems, such as document repositories, network directories, portals, e-mail systems and other collaboration software.