Collective Intelligence Applications in IT Services Business

IT outsourcing enables companies to contract out IT services, such as infrastructure and application management to external providers. IT services delivery relies on knowledge that is in collective possession of application and infrastructure specialists. With recent advances in harnessing the expertise of network-connected humans, services businesses have also started to seek strategies to efficiently utilize the collective knowledge of their employees. In this paper, we present the application of collective intelligence to three different service types: 1) automation (translation solution), 2) infrastructure management (asset inventory discovery) and 3) application management (software development). We extrapolate a set of salient properties (i.e., input, output, and size of the collective input) as the key elements for employing collective intelligence within the services business. We discuss some of the differences amongst the disparate collective intelligence services and present the resulting distinctive properties as challenges to inspire further research in services business.

By: Maja Vukovic, Osamuyimen Stewart

Published in: Proceedings of 2012 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC). Los Alamitos, CA, IEEE Computer Society, , p.486-93 in 2012

LIMITED DISTRIBUTION NOTICE:

This Research Report is available. This report has been submitted for publication outside of IBM and will probably be copyrighted if accepted for publication. It has been issued as a Research Report for early dissemination of its contents. In view of the transfer of copyright to the outside publisher, its distribution outside of IBM prior to publication should be limited to peer communications and specific requests. After outside publication, requests should be filled only by reprints or legally obtained copies of the article (e.g., payment of royalties). I have read and understand this notice and am a member of the scientific community outside or inside of IBM seeking a single copy only.

rc25272.pdf

Questions about this service can be mailed to reports@us.ibm.com .