Experiences in Designing Highly Adaptable Expertise Finder Systems

A strategy or method for identifying an expert is at the core of any Expertise Finder system. The strategy used must reflect the social requirements of the organisation and its assets, culture and technology. An Expertise Finder strategy must attempt to emulate the steps a member of that organisation would do to find the answer to their questions. Our collaboration with a large manufacturing enterprise has helped us evolve an approach to building Expertise Finder systems. Our approach contains the required flexibility to cope with the mix of technological, social and legacy factors that make each deployment of an Expertise Finder system very different to any other. The component based design allows a deployer to customise the basic system to utilise their relevant technical resources and then to build a unique strategy algorithm to produce a valid set of recommendations. The design produces challenging questions of how to produce a procedure for designing, deploying and evaluating the Expertise Finder strategy. This paper discusses the evolution of this design strategy and summarises our experiences to date.