Leveraging specialty skills and knowledge in large organizations

Another promising area for stigmergic systems is in leveraging specialty skills and knowledge within large organizations. The self-organizing and self-maintaining characteristics of stigmergy provide exceptional advantages over the ways that more conventional management systems handle this problem.

The general idea here is that anyone with specialty knowledge or skills establishes a presence by creating an agent to represent themselves (the agents providing outline descriptions of the people they represent and details of their areas of expertise).

Having access to these agents will allow anyone in a company to quickly find the right person to go to when they need information or assistance in some niche area of skill or knowledge.

The benefit of using stigmergy is that the system costs very little to run or maintain. Given suitable encouragement, employees can be motivated to enter their own data. It will enable them to get recognition for their abilities and also provide evidence of their value to the company.

Pride and competition will apply a subtle pressure on employees to maintain their agents at a high standard, because it will be so easy to make comparisons between the skills and knowledge of the agents. It would also provide a way for them to be recognized for promotion to a better position in the company.

Another advantage of stigmergic systems is their ability to self-organize to suit a company's best way of working. This contrasts strongly with most management systems, which impose procedures that have to be taught and are not always easy to get management to adopt.