Asheq Khan and Hani Jamjoom
IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC)
Honolulu, Hawaii, July 2008
Abstract. Social networking has emerged as a powerful paradigm that
connects people of similar interests. It has shown
to be effective in routing queries in referral
systems [3] and cellular networks [2], and also in
the production of frequently asked questions (FAQ)
repository [1]. In this paper, we extend its
applicability to dispatch applications as part of
fulfilling problem and change requests in
outsourced IT environments. As depicted in Figure
1, when a request is generated, it is assigned a
problem domain signature (PDS) based on the symptom
of the reported problem. A problem domain mirrors
the various supported technologies (e.g., Lotus
mail, Windows, etc). Using the signature, a
dispatcher (or dispatching application) routes the
request to a work-group that is best skilled to
resolve the request. A work-group is basically a
group of technicians—referred to as Subject Matter
Experts (SME’s)—who have been assigned to support a
specific technology (e.g., email, Oracle, etc),
typically for one or more outsourced accounts. That
said, one of the primary challenges of request
dispatch is to identify the correct work-group that
can fulfill the request. It is the focus of our work.
Of course, it is not necessary that request routing
is correct. In fact, with the exception of simple
issues (such as password resets), requests often get
re-routed and traverse multiple work-groups before
being resolved as shown in Figure 1. However, the
trail left behind resembles a thread of social
interactions among SMEs in solving requests. We
propose the SOcially Aware Routing (SOAR) system,
which leverages these social interactions to improve
the accuracy and efficiency of routing future
requests. The system can incorporate multiple
routing policies and provides load-balancing while
maintaining a high degree of routing accuracy.
Bibtex.
@inproceedings{jamjoom-SCC-08-SOAR,
author = {Asheq and Khan and Hani and Jamjoom},
title = {{SOAR: SOcially Aware Routing for Request Matching in Enterprise Environments}},
booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC)},
address = {Honolulu, Hawaii},
month = {July},
year = {2008}
}