ORACLE SUPPORT Can it be made more intelligent?

Abstract

Knowledge and accordingly the management of knowledge have been increasingly important to organizations in general and knowledge-intensive organizations in particular. The organization that this thesis if focusing on, the Oracle Support department of Gothenburg is an example of such a knowledge-intensive organization, where the employees’ and their knowledge and competence are the central assets. The purpose of this master thesis is to investigate and highlight the potential benefits Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can have on the management of knowledge at Oracle Support. Furthermore, the thesis discusses the related but somewhat different concepts of data, information, and knowledge. In addition various ICT and their influence on an organization’s management of knowledge are introduced. Technologies that are discussed are for example knowledge repositories, intranet-related tools and systems, as well as intelligent agents. When creating the interview guideline, we used an ethnographical approach, thus enabling the authors to construct and put the right questions and consequently receive answers of high value and relevance. The research gave the authors valuable insights as well as specific design proposals. The research results as well as the analysis that the five ICT-dimensions from the theoretical chapter resulted in, made it the possible for the authors to answer the problem definition, “are intelligent agents capable of improving the support process at Oracle?” affirmatively. Consequently two concrete design proposals regarding the implementation of intelligent agents were created based on the sub questions: where should they be implemented and how are they supposed to function? The first design proposal was to create a customer specific intelligent agent in Metalink, with a filter function. The second proposal was to construct intelligent agent support for the employees, thus facilitating the search and transfer for and of information and knowledge.