Knowledge-based support services: monitoring and adaptation

Knowledge management (KM) is a combination of several techniques and processes for creation, sharing and dissemination of knowledge within an enterprise. According to published reports, KM is a key ingredient in any successful customer support service business. It impacts positively the productivity of support personnel, improves the quality of their decision making, enables the extraction of knowledge from various repositories, and represents the core of automatic problem solving. The majority of the known KM systems deliver services in an open-loop fashion, where the impact of the system deployment on users or on the application domain is not known or controlled. In this paper, we report a knowledge-based system (KBS) that was deployed within Hewlett Packard Corporation to deliver customer support services. This system differs from others in that the monitoring loop is closed. This enables the support system to adapt based on observed usage patterns and evolving needs.