Anshu N. Jain

A Model for Designing Generic Services

This paper describes a model for capturing service designs and the design of service product lines. The model promotes reuse of service artifacts, enables a balanced view of the service from different stakeholder viewpoints, and provides a foundation for design for service quality. The model leverages a phased approach to design, engineering and management of services. The model has applicability throughout the service lifecycle and provides a standardized vocabulary and structure for designing and maintaining generic services, irrespective of the domain of application.

Who do you call? problem resolution through social compute units

Service process orchestration using workflow technologies have led to significant improvements in generating predicable outcomes by automating tedious manual tasks but suffer from challenges related to the flexibility required in work especially when humans are involved. Recently emerging trends in enterprises to explore social computing concepts have realized value in more agile work process orchestrations but tend to be less predictable with respect to outcomes. In this paper we use IT services management, specifically, incident management for large scale systems, to investigate the interplay of workflow systems and social computing. We apply a recently introduced concept of Social Compute Units, and flexible teams sourced based on various parameters such as skills, availability, incident urgency, etc. in the context of resolution of incidents in an IT service provider organization. Results from simulation-based experiments indicate that the combination of SCUs and workflow based processes can lead to significant improvement in key service delivery outcomes, with average resolution time per incident and number of SLO violations being at times as low as 52.7% and 27.3% respectively of the corresponding values for pure workflow based incident management.

COLLECTIVE PROBLEM SOLVING USING SOCIAL COMPUTE UNITS

Service process orchestration using workflow technologies has led to significant improvements in generating predicable outcomes by automating tedious manual tasks but suffer from challenges related to the flexibility required in work especially when humans are involved. Recently emerging trends in enterprises to explore social computing concepts have realized value in more agile work process orchestrations but tend to be less predictable with respect to outcomes. In this paper, we use IT services management, specifically, incident management for large scale systems, to investigate the interplay of workflow systems and social computing. We apply a recently introduced concept of social compute units (SCU), and flexible teams sourced based on various parameters such as skills, availability, incident urgency, etc. in the context of resolution of incidents in an IT service provider organization. Results from simulation-based experiments indicate that the combination of SCUs and workflow based processes can lea...

Participatory design of public sector services

This paper describes a methodology for the participatory design of services in the public sector. The stakeholders participating in the design include three major players, the public which uses the service, the government body which sponsors and finances the service, and the organization (government or third party) that delivers the service. We propose a method for a) gathering the - possibly conflicting - requirements for a service from the three stakeholders, b) representing the design alternatives and their levels of requirement satisfaction, and c) generating a simulation model of the service delivery process for the different design alternatives. The method is illustrated by a practical example based on a real government service.

Automated Optimal Dispatching of Service Requests

In the services domain, the customers raise issues and service requests in the form of tickets. There is a pool of personnel who work on these tickets and resolve them. The problem at hand is to dispatch these tickets to the most appropriate personnel. Optimality is applied to metrics like the mean service time taken to resolve a ticket, the fair sharing of workload among the personnel, and the size and configuration of the pool. The current state of the art involves a human dispatcher for assigning incoming service requests. Though intelligent, a human dispatcher can be suboptimal with respect to the above mentioned objectives due to the large space of parameter values to be considered. Further, there exists an opportunity to achieve high-level goals such as on-the-job training, eliminating overproduction, and workload balancing among personnel through smarter dispatch decisions. For example, target skill levels of personnel can be achieved by assigning them tickets requiring those skills increasingly. Also, overproduction can be controlled by dispatching only those tickets that otherwise would be in the danger of missing deadline (SLO) constraints. Our work involves the design and implementation of an automated dispatcher which would take various characteristics of the tickets and the pool state as input and recommend an intelligent dispatching decision for the tickets, based on the above-mentioned goals and constraints.

Separating Wheat from the Chaff – A Relationship Ranking Algorithm

We address the problem of ranking relationships in an automatically constructed knowledge graph. We propose a probabilistic ranking mechanism that utilizes entity popularity, entity affinity, and support from text corpora for the relationships. Results obtained from preliminary experiments on a standard dataset are encouraging and show that our proposed ranking mechanism can find more informative and useful relationships compared to a frequency based approach.

A tool suite to model service variability and resolve it based on stakeholder preferences

Modern information and communication technology creates new possibilities to enable participative, collaborative service design. We present a novel approach of integrating stakeholder preferences into service design. Our approach is based on modeling multiple service configurations, thus including variability into the service design. Stakeholders can evaluate value-relevant service aspects on a web-based deliberation platform. Ultimately, all stakeholder opinions are aggregated to hint the service engineer on the preferred way to implement the service. In this demo we present our tool suite to model services and their variability and the server that handles the opinions stated on the deliberation platform.

Context Sensitive Entity Linking of Search Queries in Enterprise Knowledge Graphs

Fast and correct identification of named entities in queries is crucial for query understanding and to map the query to information in structured knowledge base. Most of the existing work have focused on utilizing search logs and manually curated knowledge bases for entity linking and often involve complex graph operations and are generally slow. We describe a simple, yet fast and accurate, probabilistic entity-linking algorithm used in enterprise settings where automatically constructed, domain specific Knowledge Graphs are used. In addition to the linked graph structure, textual evidence from the domain specific corpus is also utilized to improve the performance.

Evolution of Service Quality and Some Implications on Computer Science Research

Service quality discussions in literature can be traced back to mid-20th century and have evolved from being service specific quality discussions to generic models of service quality to more advanced mathematical and statistical models. A bulk of this evolution has happened in the traditional business marketing world. With emergence of IT services, there is an increased interest to investigate the science behind these concepts. The paper is aimed to compress the evolution of these concepts into one article as a starting point for researchers from different domains to get a wider perspective on the area. In particular the review tries to highlight the challenges and problems in the existing approaches which can be potentially solved by advances in computer science. The connections have not been highlighted in the past since most known literature in service quality continues to point back to the traditional marketing world, giving primarily a marketing view. The intention is to facilitate engineers and computer science professionals to appreciate the marketing aspects of service quality, with an additional context from the IT domain, so as to fuel the research towards solving the problems in this area at the intersection of marketing, economics and science.

Tools and Infrastructure for Supporting Enterprise Knowledge Graphs.

We demonstrate EKG, a collection of tools and back-end infrastructure for creating custom, domain specific knowledge graphs. The toolkit is geared toward enterprises and government organizations where domain specific knowledge graphs are often not available. During the demo, audience members will be able to ingest their own documents and instantiate their own knowledge graphs and update them in real time. We will also present a demo app built using the toolkit consisting of more than 30 million entities and 192 million edges in order to demonstrate the kind of applications that could be built using the proposed toolkit. The app can be used to answer questions like who are the relevant persons named Steve in context of apple computers?, or who are the most important persons related to Barack Obama in context of healthcare reforms act? The functionalities of the toolkit are also exposed through REST APIs making it easier for developers to use the capabilities in their own applications.