Awareness of Organizational Expertise

Abstract

This article describes automated tools for increasing organizational awareness within a global enterprise. The MITRE Corporation is the context for this work; however, the tools and techniques are general and should apply to a wide variety of distributed, heterogeneous organizations. These tools provide awareness of team members and materials in virtual collaboration environments as well as support for automated discovery of distributed experts. The results are embodied in 3 systems: MITRE's Collaborative Virtual Workspace (CVW), Expert Finder, and XpertNet. CVW is a place-based collaboration environment that enables team members to find one another and work together. Expert Finder is an expert skill finder that exploits the intellectual products created within an organization to support automated expertise identification. XpertNet addresses the problem of detecting extant or emerging classes of expertise without a priori knowledge of their existence. Both Expert Finder and XpertNet combine to detect and track experts and expert communities within a complex work environment. After describing the background of knowledge management at MITRE, this article describes the architecture and use of collaboration and expert finder systems to enhance organizational awareness, provides some principles of expertise, and concludes with an outline of future research directions.