Victor Fernandes Cavalcante

Information needs of system administrators in information technology service factories

In this paper we describe the results of an empirical study about the information needs of system administrators. This study is based on an electronic survey with more than 200 systems administrators, or sysadmins, working on incident management in a large scale IT service delivery organization. The survey covered their information needs in both complex and routine situations. The results of the survey described in this paper go beyond previous work on system administrators by presenting a much more complex picture, suggesting that sysadmins make low usage of knowledge management tools; largely adopt personal communication and collaboration tools: and finally, need to gather information about customers from a complex set of stakeholders. The system administrators also indicated in our survey that the most useful sources of information in handling complex incidents are: (i) the customer; (ii) the customer account team; and (iii) other employees who were experts both in the customer and in particular aspects of the delivery of services. This study indicates that knowledge management in IT service factories is very challenging and possibly should evolve from the often adopted passive model to a dynamic knowledge management style emphasizing both knowledge reusability through information technologies and knowledge sharing through informal discussions among employees.

Building Socially Connected Skilled Teams to Accomplish Complex Tasks

Solving todays problems demands more than the effort of an individual, however, brilliant mind. Collaboration and team work are fundamental skills for tackling such problems. The ability of team members to work together and communicate with one another thus becomes an uppermost concern. In this context, to assemble an effective team requires an approach that goes beyond the analysis of individual skills. This paper proposes and examines the problem that takes into account different skill attributes and social ties to build an interconnected team. Our proposed solution is evaluated by means of building one team to defeat an opposite team defined in the same social network. Our experimental results show that our algorithms produces meaningful socially collaborative skilled teams.

Characterizing Time-Bounded Incident Management Systems

In this paper we propose an analytical tool, named Workload Profile Chart (WPC), to characterize the performance and quality of time-bounded incident management (TBIM) systems. Based on the normalization of incident assignment and resolution durations by their respective service level agreement (SLA), the method computes and plots the spreading of incidents on a log-log chart. We claim that this visual representation helps characterizing the performance of TBIM systems and diagnosing major issues such as resource and skill allocation, abnormal behavior, ticket characteristics, and the like. We also propose the WPC Inspection method which formalizes the process of using a WPC to characterize specific issues of TBIMs. The proposed method can be used to identify classes of problems for automated resolution or assignment, to determine resources and skills needed, and to reach a balance between productivity and quality. In addition to an in-depth description of the method, this paper presents its application in the characterization of four service organizations of a large IT service factory. As result, we are able to show aspects and characteristics of these service organizations that for the most part went unnoticed before. We also carried out an initial qualitative validation which provided evidence of the WPCs ability to accurately characterize TBIM systems.

Data-Driven Analytical Tools for Characterization of Productivity and Service Quality Issues in IT Service Factories

In this article, we propose an analytical tool, named the Workload Profile Diagnosis (WPD) method, to evaluate the performance and quality of incident management (IM) systems in information technology (IT) service factories. Based on the normalization of ticket assignment delay and resolution time by their respective service-level agreement, the method computes and plots the spreading of ticket data on a log-log chart. By comparing the actual and desired distribution values in specific areas, the WPD method diagnoses specific problems and issues in the performance of IM systems such as resource and skill allocation and abnormal behavior, and identifies opportunities for automated resolution or assignment of tickets, increases or decreases in the resources and skills needed, and ultimately aims to strike a better balance between productivity and service quality. In addition to an in-depth description of the WPD method, this article presents its application in the diagnostics of four service pools of a large IT service factory. An empirical study conducted in the IT service factory shows that most of the problems identified by the WPD method were indeed present in the service pools, therefore providing evidence of the validity of the WPD method. We conclude discussing how managers can use the method to detect and evaluate transformational opportunities to increase productivity and service quality in a systematic manner.

Designing an enterprise social tool for cross-boundary communication, coordination, and information sharing

This paper discusses the design of a social tool for cross-boundary communication, coordination, and information sharing in a large organization. Based on insights and requirements gathered in qualitative and quantitative studies conducted within the organization, the Live Corkboard, a virtual message board system enhanced with community features and text/history search is proposed as a tool to enhance communication, group awareness, and information sharing and reuse. We describe the requirements for our tool as well as how they influenced our design. The research was conducted in a large IT services delivery company which has recently changed its organizational structure from a customer-centered to a competency-centered model. Focus group evaluation results suggest that the tool will be useful to the employees in the organization.

A learning feature engineering method for task assignment

Multi-domain IT services are delivered by technicians with a variety of expert knowledge in different areas. Their skills and availability are an important property of the service. However, most organizations do not have a consistent view of this information because creation and maintenance of a skill model is a difficult task, especially in light of privacy regulations, changing service catalogs and worker turnover. We propose a method for ranking technicians on their expected performance according to their suitability for receiving the assignment of a service request without maintaining an explicit skill model describing which skills are possessed by each technician. We find appropriate assignees by making use of similarities between the assignees and previous tasks performed by them.

A Validation Study of a Visual Analytics Tool with End Users

In this paper we describe an user evaluation that aimed to understand how a group of endusers interpret a visual analytics tool in the context of service delivery. It is common for service factories to have an organization devoted to handle incidents. Many incident management systems have strict controls on how fast incidents should be handled, often subjected to penalties when targets are not met.We call Time-Bounded Incident Management (TBIM) those systems, which require clearly defined incident resolution times. In our project, research scientists proposed a method and a visual representation named Workload Profile Chart (WPC) that had as primary goal to understand the area of incident management in a service delivery department. The objective of this visual representation is to help characterizing the performance of TBIM systems and diagnosing major issues such as resource and skill allocation problems, abnormal behavior, and incident characteristics. Researchers wanted to understand if end-users, the quality analysts (QAs), would comprehend the charts and would be able to use them to identify problems and propose effective improvement actions related to TBIM activities. The study was conducted with ten QAs of a service delivery department of a IT company based in Brazil. The data was analyzed using descriptive statistical and qualitative methods. As a result, participants were mainly guided by the axes titles and chart legends to interpret the visualizations, and not always understood what kind of data the chart was displaying. Those results served as insights of how QAs think when analyzing TBIM information in a service delivery department and what improvements in the visual representation tool may be proposed to facilitate their activity. At last we identified evidences of how to design better visual analytics tools based on participant’s perceptions and interpretations of color differences and verbal information in chart labels and legend.

A Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problem with Bounded Multitasking

Abstract The Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP) is the sub-class of the Scheduling Problem that deals with scenarios where personnel or workforce employed to perform the tasks are limited and each job has an arrival time, a due date, and a penalty associated to delays. In this article, we consider a special case of the RCPSP, which we will denote as the Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problem with Bounded Multitasking (RCPSPBM), where human analysts are able to perform a limited number of tasks in parallel in exchange for cognitive overhead costs. We present a description of the problem and introduce an exact Mixed-Integer Linear Program formulation of the (RCPSPBM), used to evaluate the efficiency of (typically online) algorithms employed by dispatchers.

Lower Bounds for a Practical Scheduling Problem

Abstract This paper presents lower bound expressions for a job shop scheduling problem with practical features (a typical short-term scheduling of multiproduct batch chemical plants (Egli and Rippin, 1986)). The lower bound quality was verified with the aid of one practical instance for the problem. Upper bounds for such instance were obtained using an Asynchronous Team approach and, once that is an unsolved problem by an optimal approach, a gap of optimality is presented.