Service Delivery Resource Management Using a Socially Enhanced Resource Model

Executing knowledge-intensive business processes often requires knowledge workers to collaborate effectively on complex activities. Social network analysis is increasingly being applied to understand the underlying interaction patterns between teams and foster meaningful collaboration. The social positions of workers in such networks can be identified and used to assist effective collaboration. Resource synergies are another important factor considered during team formulation. In this chapter, we present a novel resource model that incorporates the concept of communities, social positions, and resource synergies together. We demonstrate our model and approach through real industry processes - IT incident management and software development projects. This resource model can be used to accelerate the collaboration between work groups by dedicating a collaborative unit to each incoming incident during incident resolution. For software development projects, this extended resource model can be used to formulate a synergetic team to handle tasks with a complex dependency structure.