Effective management of knowledge assets is key to surviving in today's competitive business environment. This is particularly true for large organisations, where employees have difficulties identifying where or with whom the knowledge lies. Expertise is one of the most important knowledge assets and largely resides in the heads of employees. Many attempts have been made to help locate employees with the right expertise; however, the existing systems (often referred to as expertise finding systems) carry several flaws. In organisations, there are several potential sources where expertise evidence might be found. These sources have been used by the existing approaches to profile employees' expertise. Unfortunately, there has been limited research showing whether these sources contain useful evidence of expertise. Moreover, the majority of existing approaches have not been designed to integrate with the organisations' work practices; nor have they investigated the socio-ethical challenges associated with the adoption of such systems. Therefore, there is a need for expert finding systems that utilise useful sources of expertise and integrate into existing work practices. Through industry involvement, this research has explored and validated email content as a source for expertise profiling. This thesis provides an overview of the traditional and current approaches to expertise finding. The development and implementation of the EKE (Email Knowledge Extraction) system which tries to overcome the aforementioned challenges is presented. EKE has been evaluated by end-users from both industry and academia. The evaluation results suggest that EKE is a useful system that encourages participation, and that in many cases may assist in the management of knowledge within organisations.

This paper is based on expertise structure and knowledge management (KM) perspective to develop an empirical ¡§Input-Process-Outcome¡¨ model to examine the relationship among expertise complement, expertise deployment, expertise location, expertise integration, problem-solving competency and project performance in the context of information system development (ISD) teams. We adopted the survey method and focused on the members in ISD teams to collect research data. PLS analysis was employed to examine the research model. A total of 76 ISD teams, including 337 members, confirmed our model. Results revealed that (1) expertise complement and expertise deployment are two antecedents that positively affect expertise integration and problem-solving competency; (2) expertise location is found to have a main impact on expertise deployment and expertise integration; (3) expertise integration and problem-solving competency serving as mediators are found to have a positive impact on project performance. This study offers a perspective for conducting the research and practice, as well as achieving a better insight into the fields of expertise composition structure, KM, and ISD.

Search for the knowledge within big companies could become pain not only for knowledge seekers, but as well for knowledge managers in case they want a solution, that reflects well actual state of knowledge of a company, allows discovering emerging areas of knowledge and at the same time its maintenance does not require huge amounts of effort. This doctoral thesis starts by a comprehensive analysis of needs of expertise location of current company, description of theoretical backgrounds, related approaches and fundamental directions in expertise location, analyses their advantages and disadvantages and on the ground of this analysis presents a new expertise location technique that tries to avoid disadvantages of current expertise location systems by keeping their advantages. The technique is designed to respect the needs of effective knowledge management within a company, which main assets are their employees, their knowledge reflected in unstructured documents they produce as a part of their daily work. Described knowledge mapping technique analyses document publication history of company members and proposes various measures to asses and characterize their knowledge. The implementation of the knowledge mapping technique allows its direct usage (as an expert search engine) as well as its own evaluation (validity of search engine results). The efficiency of proposed measures on various types of document sources (project directories/versioning repositories/etc.) and within various dimension configurations (current/overall knowledge search) is evaluated by the practical evaluation method introduced within the thesis. The evaluation took place in the environment of a middle-sized software company allowing seeing directly a practical usability of the expertise location technique. The results of the evaluation are presented not only in statistical form, but in a form of suggestions of how to implement the model on various document sources within the company. The results suggest that described knowledge mapping technique is a viable approach in expertise location.