Service for crowd-driven gathering of non-discoverable knowledge

Abstract

Knowledge that cannot be discovered through automated methods, such as user practices, remains in informal mediums. It is unstructured, and in collective possession of the experts, yet it is key for business insights. Typically this "Non-Discoverable knowledge" is gathered in semi-automated way, which at best provides crude estimates, and doesn't scale. In this paper, we describe our novel approach to rapidly design a process solution for a family of business objects, gathering required knowledge through the use of social networking to identify the experts. We propose a "Deconstructed Survey" that captures the knowledge request, and manages its lifecycle through task forwarding and sub-tasking. We developed the system BizRay, instantiating the proposed approach as a general-purpose, self-service Web-based, crowdsourcing service. We demonstrate its effectiveness in accelerating knowledge discovery, through our experiences with deployments for IT Optimization and Services Delivery. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.