A case based approach to serve information needs in knowledge intensive processes

Abstract

Case workers who are involved in knowledge intensive business processes have critical information needs.When dealing with a case, they often need to check how similar case(s) were handled and what best practices, methods and tools proved useful. In this paper, we present our Solution Information Management (SIM) system developed to assist case workers by retrieving and offering targeted and contextual content recommendations to them. In particular, we present a novel method for intelligently weighing different fields in a case when they are used as context to derive recommendations. Experimental results indicate that our approach can yield recommendations that are approximately 15 more precise than those obtained through a baseline approach where the fields in the context have equal weights. SIM is being actively used by case workers in a large IT services company. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.