Awareness of Organizational Expertise

This article describes automated tools for increasing organizational awareness within a global enterprise. The MITRE Corporation is the context for the current 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 three 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. 1. A Framework for Awareness Awareness encompasses knowledge of people, their presence and availability, their activities, the information they produce, and tools they use. Awareness can include static information (e.g., the physical location of a specialty department in a university) as well as more dynamic information (e.g., the location of a user, the state of the weather, or the price of a stock). Awareness may involve explicit information (e.g., the logon time of a user) or implicit information (e.g., the user’s interests as indicated by their browsing behavior). People. Awareness of people can encompass typically static properties such as their name and gender as well as more dynamic ones such as their time of login, current physical or virtual location, current title, or availability (e.g. on or off-line, busy). In the context of conferencing, this might include their role in a session (e.g., chairperson, scribe, facilitator, member) as well as properties such as permissions associated with information and/or tools. Users may have specific roles within particular work contexts (e.g., creating expert knowledge, applying it, or teaching it). Moreover, individuals have particular expertise, skills, and explicit knowledge that is key to supporting effective matchmaking. A special case involves software agents that might either act as proxies or avatars for people or may be first-order participants in a session, in which case they too may have additional properties such as location or permissions. Information. Awareness of information includes properties such as the type of information (e.g., image, document, briefing), the content of the information (e.g. who, what, when, where, how), status (e.g., draft, final), security properties, its location, and current availability. Users awareness regarding information can be managed by alerting folks about particular changes in event properties (e.g., initial publication, change of access properties, moving from draft to final) based on some model of their interest in information objects. Other kinds of awareness could include awareness of the evolutionary and/or access history of the document. Tools. Awareness of tools might encompass their availability, state, and/or current people using them. Of particular interest is the ability to have awareness in both the use of tools synchronously and asynchronously. For exam-