Business-activity driven search: Addressing the information needs of services professionals

Services business generates significant amount of human and machine created data. Search and discovery of relevant information from this data is a critical factor in enhancing workforce efficiency and operational excellence in such a business. The challenge is how to leverage the interplay among information retrieval techniques, role of human experts, and business processes. This paper presents a case for using "business activity" (e.g. a sale) as a contextual basis to meet the challenge. We developed a tool based on this approach to address the needs of services professionals. The tool is designed to support role-specific concept based queries that return the most relevant business activities first and subsequently enable retrieval of the most relevant documents and information for the business activity. Any relevant knowledge privy to an expert can be obtained by first finding the most relevant sale, followed by corresponding participant information, and finally by communicating with the participant expert. Business activity as a critical context enhances the search quality while bringing in the social network and business process. This approach suggests a new methodology for search and information management that delivers better business results for the services business. © 2007 IEEE.