Continuous Faq Updating For Service Incident Ticket Resolution

As enterprise computing becomes more and more<br> complex, the costs and technical challenges of IT system maintenance<br> and support are increasing rapidly. One popular approach to managing<br> IT system maintenance is to prepare and use a FAQ (Frequently Asked<br> Questions) system to manage and reuse systems knowledge. Such a<br> FAQ system can help reduce the resolution time for each service<br> incident ticket. However, there is a major problem where over time the<br> knowledge in such FAQs tends to become outdated. Much of the<br> knowledge captured in the FAQ requires periodic updates in response<br> to new insights or new trends in the problems addressed in order to<br> maintain its usefulness for problem resolution. These updates require a<br> systematic approach to define the exact portion of the FAQ and its<br> content. Therefore, we are working on a novel method to<br> hierarchically structure the FAQ and automate the updates of its<br> structure and content. We use structured information and the<br> unstructured text information with the timelines of the information in<br> the service incident tickets. We cluster the tickets by structured<br> category information, by keywords, and by keyword modifiers for the<br> unstructured text information. We also calculate an urgency score<br> based on trends, resolution times, and priorities. We carefully studied<br> the tickets of one of our projects over a 2.5-year time period. After the<br> first 6 months we started to create FAQs and confirmed they improved<br> the resolution times. We continued observing over the next 2 years to<br> assess the ongoing effectiveness of our method for the automatic FAQ<br> updates. We improved the ratio of tickets covered by the FAQ from<br> 32.3% to 68.9% during this time. Also, the average time reduction of<br> ticket resolution was between 31.6% and 43.9%. Subjective analysis<br> showed more than 75% reported that the FAQ system was useful in<br> reducing ticket resolution times.