Managing Expertise: Toward the Socio-Technical Perspective

The future trend of knowledge management will reflect how knowledge is produced and integrated in human social systems. The objective of knowledge management is to enhance knowledge processing. Expertise or expert knowledge is a vital resource of which decision makers need to become much more aware. This paper synthesizes the evolution of research on expertise from an interdisciplinary perspective and shows what managerial problems of handling divergent forms of expertise or expert knowledge are. It also discusses the development of related expertise management technologies and draws attention to the gap with the social science research. We develop an expertise life cycle (ELC) model supported by expertise management system architecture to bridge the gap.