Unifying IT Support with Knowledge Management

Abstract

The effectiveness of IT support is determined by the ability to quickly diagnose and solve a problem. The diagnostics process can be aided to a great extent by gathering and presenting the knowledge scattered across relevant domain in real time to the IT Support. With effective knowledge management we can even automate the diagnostics process to a great extent thus leveraging the IT Support from repetition of tasks. In this research work we discuss the challenges and values of incorporating IT Support related knowledge into a Knowledge Management System. We discuss techniques to extract topics from support portals such as Internet Forums and ticketing systems in a form understandable by Cfengine and use the Cfengine Topic Map Model to organize and represent the knowledge.