Within strategic cooperation of I.T. Co. and the Research and Educational Center of Information Management Technologies created on the basis of the Higher School of Economics (NRU HSE) in 2010, they developed a new search application ─ the system of experts searching. The system enables to quickly contact direct carriers of necessary knowledge and to avoid collecting necessary information from hundreds and thousands of documents.
This project has been made within the joint project of I.T. and NRU HSE with the financial support of the Government of the Russian Federation (the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia) under the contract No. 13.G25.31.0096 about “Creation of hi-tech production of cross-platform systems of unstructured information processing on the basis of free software for efficiency increase of innovative activity management of an enterprise in the modern Russia”.

This system performs search not in the documents but in the staff of the organization directly relating to the inquiry subject and able to help to solve the problem in the quickest and most efficient way. The experts searching system consists of two subsystems: indexing subsystem and search inquiries processing subsystem.

The first subsystem indexes the information streams created or received by the staff of the organization, and remembers interrelations between employees and terms, expressions, phrases, thematic concepts, etc. used in the documents. At input of a search inquiry the remembered information is used by the search inquiries processing subsystem for formation and granting to the user of the list of people, most relevant to the inquiry terms.
Commissioning of the experts searching system is carried out in two stages:

• Installation and adjustment of the indexing subsystem and its integration with the organization information systems: e-mail, EDMS, the personnel record system, AD/LDAP. After adjustment of the subsystem and start of the indexation process the period of information accumulation in the volume necessary for “manifestation” of knowledge and competences of employees in the created and received content. As practice shows, several weeks are enough for this purpose.
• Installation and adjustment of the search inquiries processing subsystem. The system supports some options of work of users – via the browser, by means of a separate application, the possibility to build in the functional of the experts searching system directly into MS Word 2007/2010 is also realized.

The system is licensed according to the number of the personnel of the organization or a group of organizations included into the list of potential experts. The indexing subsystem processes information created by these employees. The number of the users carrying out the search of experts is not limited. With the number of potential experts up to 500 people the price for the unit makes 600 rubles, up to 1,000 people – 540 rubles, up to 2,000 people – 480 rubles, up to 4,000 people – 420 rubles for the unit.

“The main benefit from application of the experts searching system from the point of view of an ordinary user is the possibility to reduce own labor costs and time for search of the answer for a new question. Dmitry Romanov, the Director for information management technologies development of I.T. Co. that it is important that in attempts to find the answer employees spend not only their time, but also the time of the colleagues whom they involve in these searches, — says about the system. — For the organization as a whole application of the experts searching system will give the chance to avoid repeated “invention of bicycles”, it will allow to use more effectively the employees competences, keeping investments into receiving and development of these competences. We have been actively using this system in I.T. and this essentially facilitates the search of competent employees within the big company”.