A Case Based Approach To Serve Information Needs In Knowledge Intensive Processes

Case workers who are involved in knowledge intensive business processes have critical information
needs. When dealing with a case, they often need to check how similar case(s) were handled and
what best practices, methods and tools proved useful. Since popular Case Management tools do not have
mature knowledge management capabilities, case workers must look for necessary information using various
enterprise search systems and information portals. However, state of the art enterprise information systems
fail to deliver relevant and contextual content to case workers. This sentiment is conrmed by our primary
research conducted by interviewing knowledge workers engaged in the Opportunity-To-Order process at a
large IT services company. In this paper, we present our Solution Information Management (SIM) system
developed to assist case workers by retrieving and oering targeted and contextual content recommendations
to them. In particular, we present a novel method for intelligently weighing dierent elds in a case when
they are used as context to derive recommendations. Experimental results indicate that our approach can
yield recommendations that are approximately 15% more precise than those obtained through a baseline
approach where the elds in the context have equal weights. SIM is being actively used by case workers in
a large IT services company.