SOAR: SOcially Aware Routing for Request Matching in Enterprise Environments

and
IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC)
Honolulu, Hawaii,
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}
}