Transcending "what" vs. "whom" you know

Of the three employees in question, I'm the least informed. So let's consider me "Number 3."

Number 1 has been on the project so long that he can tell me which floor of which building the sixteen square feet of discrepancy between my database total and his CAD-calculated total are.

Number 2 hasn't been around quite so long, but knows the incantations necessary to link what's in the database with what's in the CAD drawings.

But when the CAD software doesn't produce the data that Number 2 and Number 3 expect, I essentially have two choices:

1. Shuttle repeatedly between Number 1 and Number 2 in some geeky, grown-up version of "telephone"
2. Herd Number 1 and Number 2 into the same cubicle and bounce their brains off each other
   

Not at all surprisingly, the second option is where the magic happens--or, in Classical Managementese, the efficiencies are gained.

So the upshot is that both what you know and whom you know take a back seat to knowing who knows what you need to know...and (most importantly) to asking enough "right" questions to harness the various knowledge-sets for solving a single problem.