Connecting People with Questions to People with Answers.
Mehmet H. Göker, Cynthia A. Thompson, Simo Arajärvi, Kevin Hua · 2007
The Connection Machine helps PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) partners and staff to solve problems by connecting people to people. It allows information seekers to enter their question in free text, finds knowledgeable colleagues, forwards the question to them, obtains the answer and sends it back to the seeker. In the course of this interaction, the application unobtrusively learns and updates user profiles and thereby increases its routing accuracy. The Connection Machine combines aspects of expertise locators, adaptive case-based recommender systems and question answering applications. 1 The Power of Connected People Information, knowledge and experience are key success factors and the most important competitive advantage for any business. However, most of this core corporate asset is in the heads of the employees and cannot be easily accessed, shared or distributed. Capturing and protecting it in documents (electronic or otherwise) is not only cumbersome, but the documents become rapidly outdated and the maintenance effort required to keep document collections up-todate is formidable. Furthermore, in the complex business scenarios of today’s world, problem solving requires an increasingly large amount of specialized knowledge. It is nearly impossible for one individual to be an expert in every aspect of a company’s business and deliver comprehensive solutions. Problem solving requires co-operation and the sharing of ideas and information. The size of a corporation and the collective knowledge of its employees are only valuable if these employees can share their information and cooperate. We believe that the best way to provide the most up-to-date and accurate information to those who seek it is by putting them directly in touch with the experts and implemented this idea in the PwC Connection