Automating the Finding of Experts
Mark T. Maybury, Ray D’Amore, David Thomas House · Research-Technology Management · 2000
The ability to quickly find an expert or to establish an expert team is increasingly becoming a competitive advantage in our global economy (1). This article describes automated tools created for a global enterprise, The MITRE Corporation, that are used to discover and map corporate experts and areas of expertise within MITRE. The Need to Find Experts MITRE has thousands of staff and sponsors distributed across the globe working on solutions to pervasive, cross-organizational problems facing government in civil aviation, tax administration and national security. Expertise management is thus a core function in achieving MITRE's objectives of enabling innovation, integration and collaboration within and across public sector agencies. Figure I illustrates our knowledge management process, in which teams initiate a discovery process for experts and knowledge, formulate expert teams if the knowledge they seek does not exist, then collaboratively create it and, finally, capture their knowledge to archive and disseminate it to the sponsor. Our efforts are aimed at providing full life-cycle knowledge management, to include web-based expert finding and knowledge discovery services, support of expert teams (e.g., via experts and expert team finding), tools for the creation of knowledge (e.g. team facilitation/collaboration), and delivery of knowledge to a consumer. We are also exploring new virtual organizational models that will permit the efficient distributed teaming of expert talent. To enable effective distributed knowledge management, we employ a range of technologies, including global video teleconferencing, an award-winning MITRE Information Infrastructure (Mll) intranet, and public key infrastructure (PKI) enabled extranet services. Knowledge resources such as ask the expert, on-line knowledge repositories of risk management experience (RAMP), and system engineering lessons learned (Systems Engineering Program Office) are also available. Tools for staff and project discovery, information sharing (e.g., transfer folders) and virtual place-based collaboration such as our Collaborative Virtual Workspace (cvw.mitre.org) are used for agile team formation and support. As important as these services are to support expertise management, however, it has been just as important to cultivate a culture of collaboration, encapsulated in one of the three core corporate values: in partnership. If people are to collaborate, they need mechanisms for rapid team formulation, including the discovery of knowledgeable teammates and expert consultants. There are four basic functions an expert-finding service must support. These include characterizing expertise (i.e., the features), associating levels of expertise to particular experts (i.e., assigning feature values), locating experts (i.e., a search problem), and finally, selecting (using specific criteria consistent with a task need). MITRE has explored the use of two prototype systems to support expertise discovery: Expert Finder and XperNet. Expert Finder is a dynamically-updated system that uses name extraction technology and other tools to exploit the intellectual products created within MITRE for automated expertise classification. XperNet addresses the problem of detecting extant or emerging areas of expertise without a priori knowledge of their existence. Both tools combine to detect and track experts and expert communities within a complex work environment. Related Work A variety of systems address the issue of finding expertise (2). Among them are many directory services that let people nominate themselves as experts in a chosen field (3-6 or services that compare new questions against previously-answered questions and find related experts ( 7, 8). Other systems automatically establish expertise through the analysis of sources such as email messages (9,10,19), USENET postings (11), and source code files (12). …