Respond to a Cisco request for a proposal

Project ID:

RFP-2007-015

Title:

Service Creation and Enhancement

Summary:

This RFP may be of interest to teams interested in business-, operations-, and market development- research, as well as more traditional technology research.

Cisco's Customer Advocacy organization operates a worldwide Technical Assistance Center (TAC), defines and sells Advanced Services, and fully manages customer networks remotely. Generic methods and techniques are needed to allow automated support of services when new technologies are introduced (e.g., Cisco Telepresence), and to facilitate better utilization of existing data. For example, TAC experience has shown that best-practice use of information from previous trouble-cases still results in a high percentage of from-scratch troubleshooting, often due to ineffective search- and matching- methods. Questions include: "How can we define and introduce software services quickly once new technology is introduced?", "How can we enhance product and protocol development to enable in-the-field devices to automatically make effective use of newly-created services and technologies?", and "How can we optimize use of historical case-data to improve efficiency of problem-resolution?"

Full Description:

The experience of Cisco's Customer Advocacy organization (CA) has pointed to a need for a better fundamental understanding of the processes an information environment associated with operation and problem-resolution in customer networks, as well as the development and deployment of services offered to those networks. We support research into two broad, but related areas: examining the effectiveness of using historical data to resolve issues, and establishing a framework for transparently deploying new services and technologies to operational devices.

The first area, effective use of historical data, manifests itself in several ways. Here are a few examples that highlight areas where fundamental improvement in information management, categorization, searching, and natural language processing stand to improve the customer experience:

1. (algorithms for knowledge reuse): Cisco receives ten of thousands of Service Requests (SRs) per month. The main objectives are to accelerate the service resolutions, to use the captured knowledge to enhance functionalities, and to introduce new services. Unless relevant data (e.g. for similar SR) is displayed promptly and efficiently, Technical Assistance Center (TAC) engineers tend to ignore and spend their time working on the actual service request. In addition, today about 80% of customers and partners find answers on Cisco's Web. Better categorization of problem-resolution data, and better specification and matching techniques, might increase this percentage.
2. (information base development): We seek to better understand how to turn transactional data (e.g. TAC data from service requests, transactional reports viewed by customer or partners, white papers requested) into usable management information and service management data. This extends to assisting partners that manage customer networks, in making inferences from indirect customer input - for example, which services are used most/least, most troublesome areas, etc.
3. (correlation methods): Several service management systems produce data independently, including service monitoring, security threat alerts, inventory updates, incident management, etc. We want to encourage work in cross-domain correlation, which may result in more effective service-system updates, and more effective customer notification.

The second broad area, framework for service development/deployment automation, addresses the space of developing new services, and facilitating their deployment without customer disruption. Here are a few examples:

4. (augmentation methods): We seek to develop generic methods to allow automated support of services in deployed devices, when new technologies are introduced. Today, the model is either Reactive, where services are supported after the technology is introduced, or Proactive, where services are supported before the technology is introduced. Proactive support requires significant resources for every new solution and/or device. This might include, for example, extending, enhancing, or developing hierarchical techniques to augment the existing "Smart Call Home" capability.
5. (service supply-chain integration): We seek improved techniques for sharing information among service supply-chain elements. For example, this might include automatically tracking devices and features for a given customer without connecting to the customer network or asking the customer for data. This will improve customer satisfactions, accelerate service resolution, and be used as the basis to introduce new services to customers.

We invite proposals to explore one or more of the above areas; we will consider providing appropriately anonymized data to support research on new methods. As with most Internet-related technologies, incremental deployment characteristics of new techniques and algorithms are important.

Constraints and other information:

IPR will stay with the University. Cisco expects customary scholarly dissemination of results, and hopes that promising results would be made available to the community without limiting licenses, royalties, or other encumbrances.

Proposal submission:

Please use the link below to submit a proposal for research responding to this RFP. After a preliminary review, we may ask you to revise and resubmit your proposal.

Create/submit a proposal for this RFP

RFPs may be withdrawn as research proposals are funded, or interest in the specific topic is satisfied. Researchers should plan to submit their proposals as soon as possible. Submissions-to-date are reviewed at the beginning of each quarter (the first business day of: January, April, July, October).

Questions? Contact: research@cisco.com