Server Hunt: Using Enterprise Social Networks for Knowledge Discovery in IT Inventory Management

Locating IT Inventory Management information is a challenging task, as the knowledge gets transferred among employees that move within or leave the context of a large organization. Information that relates to IT inventory is hidden in the knowledge of individual team members. This fact is not reflected in organizational expertise repositories and therefore locating those employees becomes a cumbersome manual process, if not intractable. We present an expert discovery service that leverages the professional social network of an employee, who was the last known person to hold the desired inventory information (such as application and server configuration settings, passwords, etc.) but is no longer available. Evaluation results suggest that this method reconstructs the desired information more than 80% of the time, as per our experiment involving 50 cases. We demonstrate how a carefully designed crowdsourcing approach can effectively extract the desired information from the employee's professional social network and discuss its limitations.