11. Experience Management for Self-Service and Help-Desk Support

Abstract

The ever-increasing complexity of technical equipment makes it difficult for the users of these systems to operate and maintain them without support. While the probability that technical systems will fail grows exponentially with their complexity, the expertise needed to be able to control every feature of such complex systems usually exceeds the resources available to end-users.

Help-desks support end-users of complex technical equipment. Help-desk operators use their own experiences to solve most of the problems that are relayed to them. However, as systems become more complex, the areas helpdesk operators are experts in tend to diverge, i.e., problem solving experience is distributed among experts and the areas of expertise do not necessarily overlap. The goal of developing an experience management system is to create a knowledge repository that contains problem solving experiences for a complex technical domain that changes over time. This knowledge repository will be used in an organization, by a group of people with varying levels of expertise, in a time-criticalo peration.

The HOMER (in German: “HOtline Mit ERfahrung”) system presented in this chapter has been developed as part of the INRECA-II project and has been published by Göker et al. (1998), Göker and Roth-Berghofer (1999a), Bergmann, Breen, Göker, Manago, and Wess (1999a), and Bergmann, Göker, Roth-Berghofer, and Traphoener (1999). Although HOMER has been developed for a specific application in mind, i.e., the CAD/CAM help-desk at DaimlerChrysler in Sindelfingen, it is still a generic vertical platform for realizing help-desk and self-service experience management applications in various domains.