Next best step and expert recommendation for collaborative processes in IT service management

Abstract

IT service management processes are people intensive and collaborative by nature. There is an emerging trend in IT service management applications, moving away from rigid process orchestration to the leveraging of collaboration technologies. An interesting consequence is that staff can collaboratively define customized and ad-hoc step flows, consisting of the sequence of activities necessary to handle each particular case. Capturing and sharing the knowledge of how previous similar cases have been resolved becomes useful in recommending what steps to take and what experts to consult to handle a new case effectively. We present an approach and a tool that analyzes previous IT case resolutions in order to recommend the best next steps to handle a new case, including recommendations on the experts to invite to help with resolution of the case. Our early evaluation results indicate that this approach shows significant improvement for making recommendations over using only process models discovered from log traces. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.