Couple of days before I got a news that Google acquired another popular Internet service called Aardvark in nearly $50 Millions. Aardvark is a social search engine service that connects users live with friends or friends-of-friends who are able to answer their questions. Based on my short interaction with the tool i realized that it can become a great boon for any kind of organizations.
I started using the Aardvark after this news and i found it really good tool to get the answers properly and pretty fast. I am using Yahoo Answers for all my non-technical questions and Stackoverflow for technical questions as I am a software engineer. Though both of these tools are doing pretty well, I was still finding that both the services are missing something.
Now to show Aardvark from an organization perspective, I work in a quite a big organization which employs huge and diversified manpower. Such a big enterprise contains an MIS system to keep employee profile information for future references. However its really hard to keep the latest profile information of each of the employee in the organization.
Every organization generates enormous amount of industry specific problem. When the problem arise they either seek an internal help based on the employee profile information or contact external agencies for support. In any case its time consuming at first and huge investment at the end, in the worst case an organization spends huge money on an external agency who fails to do the job and eventually either the problem is dropped or they find someone from inside.
To not cause such a heavy damage, now a days most of the companies (well software in particular) use Wiki/Forum/Blogs to tackle the situation and spread the knowledge. But this approach is limited to a set of companies and its not interactive. User seeking the information has to search through the set of services to find the answer to his problem.
People tend to learn new things every now and then so their profile keeps on updating compared to organization which prefers to update the profile information every six months or a year. So this approach creates mismatch between the actual employee profile and its organizational print. Because of this match many a times Organization end up hiring brand new resource or seek for some external agency to solve the problem.
Aardvark is a tool which can really bridge the gap between this mismatch. Employee getting new knowledge every now and then can update her profile immediately. Aardvark is intelligent enough in delegating the question to right persons. Such an intelligent and fast communication medium can be used in Enterprises to solve problems immediately without investing further valuable resources.
Well while writing this Aardvark is officially part of Google so in future we might see many new features combined with existing Google services.
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