Knowledge is Power: Provide Your IT-Support with Domain-Specific High-Quality Solution Material

Abstract

As more and more business processes are based on IT services the high availability of these processes is dependent on the IT-Support. Thus, making the IT-Support a critical success factor of companies. This paper presents how this department can be supported by providing the staff with domain-specific and high-quality solution material to help employees faster when errors occur. The solution material is based on previously solved tickets because these contain precise domain-specific solutions narrowed down to e.g., specific versions and configurations of hard-/software used in the company. To retrieve the solution material ontologies are used that contain the domain-specific vocabulary needed. Because not all previously solved tickets contain high-quality solution material that helps the staff to fix issues the de-signed IT-Support system separates lowfrom high-quality solution material. This paper presents (a) theory-and practicalmotivated design requirements that describe the need for automatically retrieved solution material, (b) develops two major design principles to retrieve domainspecific and high-quality solution material, and (c) evaluates the instantiations of them as a prototype with organic real-world data. The results show that previously solved tickets of a company can be pre-processed and retrieved to IT-Support staff based on their current queries.

Exploring the Shifting Dynamics of Information Source Selection: Situational Characteristics and the Rise of Artificial Intelligence

“…For the literature on HI system design and particularly in the context of support services (Bailey & Barley, 2020;Kubiak & Rass, 2018;Poser & Bitner, 2021;Schmidt et al, 2021), we contribute to its body of design knowledge. Specifically, we focus on knowledge for instantiations, presenting the rationale behind design requirements, design principles, and design features (Prat et al, 2022).…”

“…In the context of IT frontline services, this task falls on support agents in hopes to leverage their domain knowledge. Yet, support agents are under immense operational pressure (Schmidt et al, 2021). Even without the advantages of intelligent frontline support technologies, the data quality of tickets has thus been rather challenging (Salah, Maciá-Fernández, Díaz-Verdejo, & Sánchez-Casado, 2016) and conventional systems provide no direct incentive for the person, who is supposed to label the tickets (Kubiak & Rass, 2018).…”

“…Recent research in frontline service technologies has drawn upon the technological advances made in artificial intelligence and particularly hybrid intelligence (HI) (Dellermann, Ebel, Söllner, & Leimeister, 2019) to augment support agents in their problem-solving activities (Kubiak & Rass, 2018;Poser et al, 2022;Poser & Bitner, 2021;Schmidt, Li, Weigel, & Peters, 2021). HI systems are defined by combination of complementary capabilities of human (e.g.…”

“…These systems aid them in solving customer issues (Poser & Bitner, 2021). The integration of intelligent frontline ITservice systems that augment the work processes of support agents have been identified as important (Pentland, 1992;Poser & Bitner, 2021;Schmidt et al 2021). Mechanisms of providing high-quality input data for the system during operations have recently also gained research interest (Grønsund & Aanestad, 2020).…”