Cognitive system to achieve human-level accuracy in automated assignment of helpdesk email tickets

Ticket assignment/dispatch is a crucial part of service delivery business with lot of scope for automation and optimization. In this paper, we present an end-to-end automated helpdesk email ticket assignment system, which is also offered as a service. The objective of the system is to determine the nature of the problem mentioned in an incoming email ticket and then automatically dispatch it to an appropriate resolver group (or team) for resolution. The proposed system uses an ensemble classifier augmented with a configurable rule engine. While design of classifier that is accurate is one of the main challenges, we also need to address the need of designing a system that is robust and adaptive to changing business needs. We discuss some of the main design challenges associated with email ticket assignment automation and how we solve them. The design decisions for our system are driven by high accuracy, coverage, business continuity, scalability and optimal usage of computational resources. Our system has been deployed in production of three major service providers and currently assigning over 40,000 emails per month, on an average, with an accuracy close to 90% and covering at least 90% of email tickets. This translates to achieving human-level accuracy and results in a net saving of about 23000 man-hours of effort per annum

Mining Helpdesk Databases For Professional Development Topic Discovery

This single-site, instrumental case study created and tested a methodological road map by which academic institutions can use text data mining techniques to derive technology skillset weaknesses and professional development topics from the site’s technical support helpdesk database. The methods employed were described in detail and applied to the helpdesk database of an independent, co-educational boarding high school in the northeastern United States. Standard text data mining procedures, including the formation of a wordlist (frequently occurring terms), and the creation and application of clustering (automated data grouping) and classification (automated data labeling) models generated meaningful and revealing themes from the helpdesk database. The results of the text mining procedures were bolstered and analyzed using human interpretation and spreadsheet-based summaries. Major findings included the discovery of four prominent technologies that warranted professional development at the site and a universally-applicable approach to undertaking successful helpdesk data mining endeavors. The case study’s conclusions included a call to action for researchers to leverage the methodology at other locations. Future data mining studies may yield practical and applicable knowledge at research sites. Shared methods, approaches, and findings from such studies will advance the field of helpdesk data mining used to glean professional development topics for the very people who have submitted technological support requests to helpdesk providers

Ticket Automation: an Insight into Current Research with Applications to Multi-level Classification Scenarios

odern service providers often have to deal with large amounts of customer requests, which they need to act upon in a swift and effective manner to ensure adequate support is provided. In this context, machine learning algorithms are fundamental in streamlining support ticket processing workflows. However, a large part of current approaches is still based on traditional Natural Language Processing approaches without fully exploiting the latest advancements in this field. In this work, we aim to provide an overview of support Ticket Automation, what recent proposals are being made in this field, and how well some of these methods can generalize to new scenarios and datasets. We list the most recent proposals for these tasks and examine in detail the ones related to Ticket Classification, the most prevalent of them. We analyze commonly utilized datasets and experiment on two of them, both characterized by a two-level hierarchy of labels, which are descriptive of the ticket’s topic at different levels of granularity. The first is a collection of 20,000 customer complaints, and the second comprises 35,000 issues crawled from a bug reporting website. Using this data, we focus on topically classifying tickets using a pre-trained BERT language model. The experimental section of this work has two objectives. First, we demonstrate the impact of different document representation strategies on classification performance. Secondly, we showcase an effective way to boost classification by injecting information from the hierarchical structure of the labels into the classifier. Our findings show that the choice of the embedding strategy for ticket embeddings considerably impacts classification metrics on our datasets: the best method improves by more than 28% in F1- score over the standard strategy. We also showcase the effectiveness of hierarchical information injection, which further improves the results. In the bugs dataset, one of our multi-level models (ML-BERT) outperforms the best baseline by up to 5.7% in F1-score and 5.4% in accuracy

Access Control In and For the Real World

Access control is a core component of any information-security strategy. Researchers have spent tremendous energy over the past forty years defining abstract access-control models and proving various properties about them. However, surprisingly little attention has been paid to how well these models work in real socio-technical systems (i.e., real human organizations). This dissertation describes the results of two qualitative studies (involving 52 participants from four companies, drawn from the financial, software, and healthcare sectors) and observes that the current practice of access control is dysfunctional at best. It diagnoses the broken assumptions that are at the heart of this dysfunction, and offers a new definition of the access-control problem that is grounded in the requirements and limitations of the real world

The Relationship and Benefits of Aligning Communication Management and Information System Management : Case: Tietokeskus Oy

Internal communication management has been rising in popularity in the communication management domain in recent years. Organizations have started seeing employees as one of the most important stakeholders to communicate effectively. In the modern business landscape, most managers find themselves conducting internal communications through some kind of communication technology, and in most cases through many at the same time. Virtual teams are becoming commonplace in organizations and have created the need for channels and networks through which communications can be done fast and easily. Even if virtual teams are not used, communication technology usage for internal communications brings many benefits. The goals of this research are to identify the relationship between communication management and information system management practices and to identify the drivers of internal communication success and use them in creating an effective internal communication strategy. Qualitative case study research was conducted using the Gioia-method. The research data for this thesis was gathered by conducting semi-structured interviews within the case organization. Ten interviews were conducted with participants from every business unit within the case organization to obtain as much diversity of answers as possible. These interviews helped in understanding what are the drivers of effective internal communications and what are the allignment points between communication management and information system management. Additionally, a questionaire was held within the case organization, which helped in understanding the case organization’s internal communication satisfaction. In addition a literature review was gathered from the subjects of communication management and information system management. From the communication management literature, an internal communication matrix was selected as the theoretical backbone for understanding organizations’ internal communication aspects. Furthermore, from information system management literature, information technology system management is used as the framework for how the management of organizations’ IT systems is conducted. The found research results were shown in two distinct data structures about: the key alignment points between communication management and information system management as well as the drivers of effective internal communication strategy. These data structures were created by first open-coding the gathered interview data to create 1st-order codes. From these codes 2nd-order categories were created, and ultimately three aggregate dimensions for both data structures were found. The research found alignment points between communication management and information system management, which were: enhanced communication, change management, and crisis management. Furthermore, an internal communication strategy framework is created through which organizations can create a more effective internal communication strategy.Sisäisen viestinnän hallinta on viime vuosina kasvattanut suosiotaan viestinnän hallinnan alalla. Organisaatiot ovat alkaneet pitää työntekijöitä yhtenä tärkeimmistä sidosryhmistä, joille on viestittävä tehokkaasti. Nykyaikaisessa yritysmaailmassa useimmat johtajat toteuttavat sisäistä viestintää jonkin viestintäteknologian avulla, ja useimmiten useiden eri viestintäteknologioiden avulla samanaikaisesti. Virtuaalitiimit ovat yleistymässä organisaatioissa, ja ne ovat luoneet tarpeen kanaville ja verkostoille, joiden kautta viestintä voidaan hoitaa nopeasti ja helposti. Vaikka virtuaalitiimejä ei käytettäisikään, viestintäteknologian käyttö sisäisessä viestinnässä tuo monia etuja. Tämän tutkimuksen tavoitteina on selvittää viestinnän hallinnan ja tietojärjestelmien hallinta käytäntöjen välinen suhde sekä tunnistaa sisäisen viestinnän onnistumisen ajurit ja käyttää niitä tehokkaan sisäisen viestintästrategian luomisessa. Laadullinen case-tutkimus toteutettiin Gioia-menetelmää käyttäen. Tämän tutkielman tutkimusaineisto kerättiin tekemällä puolistrukturoituja haastatteluja case-organisaatiossa. Kymmenen haastattelua suoritettiin, ja osallistujia oli kaikista case-organisaation liiketoimintayksiköistä, jotta saataisiin mahdollisimman monipuolisia vastauksia. Haastattelut auttoivat ymmärtämään, mitkä ovat tehokkaan sisäisen viestinnän taustatekijät ja mitkä ovat kommunikaation hallinnan ja tietojärjestelmien hallinnan liittymäkohdat. Lisäksi case-organisaatiossa järjestettiin kysely, joka auttoi ymmärtämään case-organisaation sisäisen viestinnän tyytyväisyyttä. Lisäksi kerättiin kirjallisuuskatsaus kommunikaatio hallinnan ja tietojärjestelmien hallinnan aiheista. Kommunikaatio hallinnan koskevasta kirjallisuudesta valittiin sisäisen viestinnän matriisi teoreettiseksi selkärangaksi organisaatioiden sisäisen kommunikaation näkökohtien ymmärtämiseksi. Lisäksi tietojärjestelmien hallintaa käsittelevästä kirjallisuudesta käytetään information technology system management:ia viitekehyksenä sille, miten organisaatioiden tietoteknisten järjestelmien hallintaa toteutetaan. Löydetyt tutkimustulokset esiteltiin kahdessa eri rakennemallissa, jotka koskivat seuraavia asioita: viestinnän johtamisen ja tietojärjestelmien johtamisen väliset keskeiset yhteensovittamispisteet sekä tehokkaan sisäisen kommunikaatiostrategian ajurit. Nämä tietorakenteet luotiin avoimesti koodaamalla kerätty haastatteluaineisto ensin 1. asteen käsitteiden luomiseksi. Näistä käsitteistä luotiin 2. asteen teemat, ja lopulta molemmille tietorakenteille löydettiin kolme kokonaisdimensiota. Tutkimuksessa löydettiin kommunikaatio hallinnan ja tietojärjestelmien hallinnan välisiä yhtymäkohtia, jotka olivat: tehostettu viestintä, muutos hallinta ja kriisinhallinta. Lisäksi voitiin luoda sisäisen kommunikaation strategian viitekehys, jonka avulla organisaatiot voivat luoda tehokkaamman sisäisen kommunikaatiostrategian

Digitalization in Knowledge Management Systems for Project and Operational Management in Software Development to Increase Efficiency

PT Snack Sehat is a manufacturing company that produces healthy snacks and beverages in Indonesia. Its IT division has a software department that manages all creation and maintenance of information system projects. Although the software department planned and monitored project development thoroughly during their work, 42% of projects were late in 2020. Those late projects' costs led to financial loss and kept rising through 2020-2021. Digitalization is how technologies affect several aspects of life, like social interactions, business operations, and how people work. Digitalization improved and sped up knowledge-sharing processes within the organization. Since knowledge sharing is done more frequently, the absorptive capacity will also be improved. This brings up the question of how to design a KM program with digital tools that will help PT Snack Sehat to increase its efficiency in project development and operation support. The primary data for this research was gathered from KM Assessment using APO KM Framework and focus group discussion with top and middle-level managers from PT Snack Sehat. To develop a KM program, the research will use Six Steps KM Processes, which consist of KM Project, KM Assessment, KM Planning, K-Development, KM Implementation, and KM Evaluation. The development steps will include defining the objectives of the KM program, answering questions related to the knowledge management components (people, process, and technology), determining the knowledge management strategy based on KM objectives, and setting the action plan to get ten commitments from top-level management. The results show several processes and methods that need to be added to the current KM: KM Orientation & Training, Shadowing, Sharing Knowledge Checklist, Lesson Learned Document, Document Validation, and Document Organization. The complete knowledge management process will also be mapped in a Knowledge Stock and Flow Diagram using SECI Matrix. Keywords:  Project Development, Operational Management, Six Steps KM Processes, SECI Matrix, Digitalization, Absorptive Capacity, Efficienc

From Bugs to Decision Support – Leveraging Historical Issue Reports in Software Evolution

Software developers in large projects work in complex information landscapes and staying on top of all relevant software artifacts is an acknowledged challenge. As software systems often evolve over many years, a large number of issue reports is typically managed during the lifetime of a system, representing the units of work needed for its improvement, e.g., defects to fix, requested features, or missing documentation. Efficient management of incoming issue reports requires the successful navigation of the information landscape of a project. In this thesis, we address two tasks involved in issue management: Issue Assignment (IA) and Change Impact Analysis (CIA). IA is the early task of allocating an issue report to a development team, and CIA is the subsequent activity of identifying how source code changes affect the existing software artifacts. While IA is fundamental in all large software projects, CIA is particularly important to safety-critical development. Our solution approach, grounded on surveys of industry practice as well as scientific literature, is to support navigation by combining information retrieval and machine learning into Recommendation Systems for Software Engineering (RSSE). While the sheer number of incoming issue reports might challenge the overview of a human developer, our techniques instead benefit from the availability of ever-growing training data. We leverage the volume of issue reports to develop accurate decision support for software evolution. We evaluate our proposals both by deploying an RSSE in two development teams, and by simulation scenarios, i.e., we assess the correctness of the RSSEs' output when replaying the historical inflow of issue reports. In total, more than 60,000 historical issue reports are involved in our studies, originating from the evolution of five proprietary systems for two companies. Our results show that RSSEs for both IA and CIA can help developers navigate large software projects, in terms of locating development teams and software artifacts. Finally, we discuss how to support the transfer of our results to industry, focusing on addressing the context dependency of our tool support by systematically tuning parameters to a specific operational setting

Graduate Catalog 2014-2015

This catalog is an informative guide to graduate programs and other useful information about university services and policies

Project Management Competencies Leading to Technology Implementation Success at a Community College

The problem addressed in this study was to understand the knowledge gap between project management competencies available and those needed for successful implementation of technology projects at a community college. The purpose of the qualitative study was to evaluate, compare, and analyze the performance of project managers of 2 large technology projects in a specific community college with respect to each other and what was known about achieving project success at a public institution of higher education (IHE). The research questions for this study examined the competencies exhibited by the project leaders, the success parameters established for the projects, and how the individual project leaders were selected. The conceptual frameworks that supported this study were enterprise wide technology implementation, project management, success assessment, and public IHE operational structures. A comparative case study approach using responsive interviewing techniques with 10 stakeholders from each of the projects yielded dialog that was coded in combination with documentation and observation evidence using recognized competency standards. The relationships and significance of patterns found in this data were analyzed against the proposition that the level of project success is a function of the application of project management competencies of the project leader. The results identified 9 elements that characterized competencies specific to effective project outcome success within the context of the community college. The results contribute to positive social change include implementation of organizational project management initiatives that will enable community colleges to continue to serve a vital role in providing an affordable college education