Expertise Finding
David T. Merritt, Mark Steven Ackerman, Pei-Yao Hung · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2016
This chapter presents a historical review of efforts to develop technological systems that help people locate expertise in organizational contexts. Expertise finding is presented as a socio-technical challenge in that it is constituted both by material features of a technology and its associated code and algorithms, and the actions of individuals who design, populate, and appropriate the various technologies. Although the allure of expertise finding systems is evident—locating individuals who can provide relevant, timely, and trustworthy knowledge—designers have struggled to develop systems that can accurately and reliably find expertise at scale in organizational settings. This chapter addresses both the social and technical challenges associated with expertise finding, and briefly describes the development and use of several expertise finding systems over the past few decades.