The automation of helpdesks

Helpdesks are becoming increasingly more important in large organisations. These organisations may be commercial or academic. However, management of such helpdesks is becoming increasingly more difficult as the amount of knowledge that must be acquired and maintained by the advisor becomes rapidly unmanageable. The sources of information are highly distributed and the domains are becoming larger. No one person can be an expert in all necessary domains. Many attempts are being made to increase the effectiveness of these helpdesks. The solution may lie in an intelligent assistant for the advisor. This paper describes such a system. The advisors remain central to the process. They may train the system and their ability to communicate effectively with a variety of users, each with different experience and knowledge, modes of learning and information requirements cannot be replicated by a software system. However, an intelligent system can help the advisor to maintain their knowledge, acquiring knowledge from a variety of sources and assisting in the diagnosis of problems. The advisor formulates queries from users for the system, receives the information from the system and communicates this in a manner appropriate to the user who had the initial problem.