Collective Problem Solving using Social Compute Units

Service process orchestration using workflow technologies has led to significant improvements in generating predicable outcomes by automating tedious manual tasks but suffer from challenges related to the flexibility required in work especially when humans are involved. Recently emerging trends in enterprises to explore social computing concepts have realized value in more agile work process orchestrations but tend to be less predictable with respect to outcomes. In this paper, we use IT services management, specifically, incident management for large scale systems, to investigate the interplay of workflow systems and social computing. We apply a recently introduced concept of social compute units (SCU), and flexible teams sourced based on various parameters such as skills, availability, incident urgency, etc. in the context of resolution of incidents in an IT service provider organization. Results from simulation-based experiments indicate that the combination of SCUs and workflow based processes can lead to significant improvement in key service delivery outcomes, with average resolution time per incident and number of SLO violations being at times as low as 53.7% and 38.1%, respectively of the corresponding values for pure workflow based incident management. Moreover, significant benefits may also be obtained through cross-skilling of practitioners via exposure to new skills in the context of collaborative work.