Abbe, I agree that maintaining an employee skills database is a difficult challenge. In the case of the Key Contacts List, I was the curator of information about executives and upper-level managers that involved asking administrative assistants to provide me with updates every month. This was time-consuming but doable, whereas getting employees to update their own skills is much harder.

I have written two articles about expertise location and skills databases:

• Expertise Locators
• How to Locate Expertise

For a less-important digression, channeling my inner William Safire, here are definitions of abbreviation, acronym, and initialism:

• abbreviation -- a shortened form of a word or phrase
• acronym -- a word (that can be pronounced) formed from the initial parts of a series of words
• initialism -- a group of initial letters used as an abbreviation for a name or expression, each letter being pronounced separately