Exploiting email: extracting knowledge to support knowledge sharing

Effective management of knowledge assets is key to surviving in today’s competitivebusiness environment. This is particularly true for large organisations, where employeeshave difficulties identifying where or with whom the knowledge lies. Expertise is one ofthe 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) carryseveral flaws. In organisations, there are several potential sources where expertiseevidence might be found. These sources have been used by the existing approaches toprofile employees’ expertise. Unfortunately, there has been limited research showingwhether these sources contain useful evidence of expertise. Moreover, the majority ofexisting approaches have not been designed to integrate with the organisations’ workpractices; nor have they investigated the socio-ethical challenges associated with theadoption of such systems. Therefore, there is a need for expert finding systems thatutilise useful sources of expertise and integrate into existing work practices. Throughindustry involvement, this research has explored and validated email content as a sourcefor expertise profiling. This thesis provides an overview of the traditional and currentapproaches to expertise finding. The development and implementation of the EKE (EmailKnowledge Extraction) system which tries to overcome the aforementioned challenges ispresented. EKE has been evaluated by end-users from both industry and academia. Theevaluation results suggest that EKE is a useful system that encourages participation, andthat in many cases may assist in the management of knowledge within organisations.