Enterprise Expertise Characterization

Abstract

All enterprises have expertise in the form of their employees, and their expertise management is crucial as it helps in locating the right person for the right job, problem solving and question answering among others. This task can easily become complex for a large organization, like IBM, which is the subject of our study. Enterprises face the challenge of sharing their employee's expert knowledge and employ tools to register, communicate, and search employees as a knowledge resource. The majority of these tools fail to take into account the following information about the person: demographics, credibility, behaviour, reputation, and accessibility. Whereas, external social sources are rich in these user dimensions, e.g. LinkedIn (a business oriented social network). Using this as motivation, we performed a case study at IBM in which we combine external social media source and enterprise social sources to better understand their employee expertise. The study involved 211 IBM employees, whose relevant social data was collected. We use this data to analyze their expertise related fields in both the external and enterprise sources. This analysis let us conclude that addition of an external social media source adds more value to the internal expertise data of the employee. We also validate this claim with the help of an information retrieval system setup.