Using task histories to support person-to-person knowledge exchange: Extracting and using contextual overlap and levels of expertise to connect knowledge workers

Knowledge within organizations is increasingly distributed, which raises the challenge to connect the right individuals for knowledge exchange when needed. In this contribution we analyze this challenge in detail and propose a concept to connect the right individuals by relying on the task histories of the knowledge workers. We first investigate relevant theoretical models such as transactive memory theory, social capital theory for knowledge exchange and a model based on socio-motivational and problem solving theory to find relevant constructs. We then analyze the relevant state-of-the-art to find that all approaches have some limitations with respect to the theoretical models. Our proposed solution to the challenge builds on using task histories for the matching, and we show how it can be used to determine contextual overlap and level of expertise - the first one is an adequate indicator for willingness to interact while the second one is an indicator for ability to have a fruitful interaction. We then describe a case study in which we employed our concept in a three month timeframe with 93 individuals. A survey after the case study shows that our assumptions concerning the relevance and benefit of context overlap are substantiated.