IBM Control Desk using IBM Watson

In this article I’m presenting a Proof Of Concept (POC) to use IBM Watson as support to IBM Control Desk. My idea is to use IBM Watson to find relevant results quickly from large numbers of documents to address the Service Request.

My solution is able to leverage the power of IBM Bluemix during the IBM Control Desk service request handling. Bluemix is an open-standard, cloud platform for building, running, and managing applications, moreover Bluemix exposes powerful set of IBM and third-party APIs and services. You can simply create a service based on Watson APIs. My POC uses the Watson Retrieve and Rank service :

The Retrieve and Rank service fits with customer-facing professionals needs, such as support staff, contact center agents, field technicians, and other professionals. In IBM Control Desk service request scenario the Customer support finds quick answers for customers from your growing set of answer documents asking to Watson.

To use the Retrieve and Rank service can improve information retrieval as compared to standard operator experience or knowledge base. The ranker models take advantage of rich data in your documents to provide more relevant answers to queries. You benefit from new features developed both by the open source community and from advanced information retrieval techniques that are built by the Watson algorithm teams.

Here a tutorial guide you through how to create and train the IBM Watson Retrieve and Rank service with sample data. To complete this tutorial you need a Bluemix account, you can get 30-day trial for free here.

How IBM Watson Retrieve and Rank works ?

First you must create a Solr cluster By REST APIs , a Solr cluster manages your search collections. Second you must create a Solr collection, it is a logical index of the data in your documents.

My POC’s goal is to address the service requests regarding e-mail client configuration problem. Yes I have really some Client where Customer support has the 30% of service request regarding email problems.

So I created a custom collection on how to troubleshoot e-mail configuration problems. This is a portion of my Solr collection:

 "add" : {
    "doc" : {
      "id" : 20002,
      "author" : "Microsoft support",
      "bibliography" : "tech note MS2",
      "title": "create and configure an email profile in Outlook",
      "body" : "create and configure an email profile in Outlook: Step 1: Open the Mail Setup dialog box   Click Start, click Run, type Control in the Open box, and then click OK.     Depending on the version of Windows running on your computer, do one of the following:         Windows XP:         If you are in the Category View, click User Accounts, and then click Mail.         If you are not in the Category View, double-click Mail.        Windows Vista:        Click User accounts, and then click Mail.    The Mail Setup dialog box opens. Step 2: Start the New Profile wizard     Click Show Profiles.   Click Add to start the New Profile wizard. Step 3: Create a profile    In the Profile Name box, type Test, and then click OK to name the new e-mail profile.    Follow the steps appropriate for your version of Outlook:        Microsoft Office Outlook 2010            Click to select the Manually configure server settings check box.             Click Next.             On the Choose Service page, click Internet E-mail.            Click Next.            Fill in the boxes in the Internet E-mail Settings dialog box. Make sure that the Account Type setting is set to POP3.             Note Enter the information from your ISP or from your e-mail administrator in the Incoming mail server box and in the Outgoing mail server (SMTP) box.             Click Next, follow the prompts to finish setting up your account, and then click Finish.            Your new profile is created. Go to step 4.        Microsoft Office Outlook 2007            Click to select the Manually configure server settings check box.            Click Next.             On the Choose E-mail service page, click Internet E-mail.             Click Next.            Fill in the boxes in the Internet E-mail Settings dialog box. Make sure that the Account Type setting is set to POP3.            Note Enter the information from your ISP or from your e-mail administrator in the Incoming mail server box and in the Outgoing mail server (SMTP) box.            Click Next, follow the prompts to finish setting up your account, and then click Finish.             Your new profile is created. Go to step 4.        Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 and earlier versions of Outlook            Click Add a new e-mail account.             Click Next.             Click POP3.             Click Next.             Fill in the boxes in the Internet E-mail Settings dialog box. Make sure that the Account Type setting is set to POP3.             Note Enter the information from your ISP or from your e-mail administrator in the Incoming mail server and Outgoing mail server (SMTP) boxes.             Click Next.             Click Finish.             Your new profile is created. Go to step 4.  Step 4: Set the default profile    On the Mail dialog box, under the When Starting Microsoft Outlook, use this profile box, click to select the new profile that you created in step 3.     Click OK.     Use Outlook to send yourself an e-mail.     If you successfully receive the e-mail, you have completed troubleshooting the problem.    If you do not receive the e-mail, creating a new profile did not resolve your problem. Try method 2.     Note If you use Dial-Up Networking to connect to the Internet, unfortunately, this article will not be able to help you further. Refer to the Next steps section for additional options."    
}
  },

"add" : {
    "doc" : {
      "id" : 20003,
      "author" : "TechRepublic",
      "title": "tips for Outlook mai",
      "bibliography" : "tips for Outlook mail",
      "body" : "Outlook is currently the de facto standard email/calendaring client in the business world. Generally speaking, it works like a champ. But there are times when Outlook goes down in a ball of flames. When that happens, if you don't have a bevy of tricks to pull out of your pocket, you might find yourself in a world of pain. But troubleshooting Outlook doesn't have to be a nightmare. In fact, you can almost script out the troubleshooting process with these 10 handy tips. 1: Scan PST Those PST files will inevitably develop errors. When they do, they can prevent Outlook from working properly. When Outlook is starting to fuss, one of the first things I do is run scanpst.exe against each PST file used within Outlook. But be warned: Scan PST can take some time to run. It has to back up your data file, scan for errors, and repair any errors found. If the data file is large, this process can take quite some time. To run Scan PST, you'll need to locate the scanpst.exe executable. (Its location will depend upon the version of Windows being used.
}
  },

  "commit" : { }
}

I trained the Watson’s ranker by REST APIs, the ranker learns from examples before it can re-rank results from queries that it hasn’t seen before.

Next I upload my data collection by another REST API invoked by curl

curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -u "c0076286-3009-40c2-886f-bf6dXXXXX":"UM9NZ7vnfYYYY" "https://gateway.watsonplatform.net/retrieve-and-rank/api/v1/solr_clusters/sce5325126_b64b_4141_af68_31af26cf7683/solr/example-collection/update" --data-binary @/home/noioso/Downloads/cranfield_dataMail.json

After configured the Retrieve and Rank service on Bluemix platform I customized IBM Control Desk.

I extend the TICKET object with three attributes (using database configuration) :

• WATSONR1 (CLOB)  to store the first Watson ‘s document retrieved.
• WATSONR2 (CLOB) to store the second Watson’s document retrieved.
• WATSONR3 (CLOB) to store the third Watson’s document retrieved.

I modified the Service Request application with the following items (using application designer) :

• three text field associated with three new attributes created on TICKET object.
• a button, that is your IBM Watson button. By this button Control Desk calls the REST API to retrieve document based on Service Request description.
• a signature to manage the button-pressed event action, see IBM Maximo application developer guide for details.

You can use your IBM Watson button preferred image in maximo\applications\maximo\maximouiweb\webmodule\webclient\skins\tivoliXY\images ,  remember to rebuild & redeploy the Maximo ear in your Application Server before to use the new SR application.

At the end the Service Request application looks like this one:

I created a Java custom action to handle the button–pressed event. The class implements the psdi.common.action.ActionCustomClass interface and the applyCustomAction method:

public class IBMWatsonAction implements ActionCustomClass {


    public void applyCustomAction(MboRemote mbo, Object[] params) throws MXException, RemoteException {
    
        String SRdesc = mbo.getString("DESCRIPTION");
                
        callRESTAPIRetrieveAndRank(SRdesc);
        
    }

I have also used a private method to invoke the follow REST API to retrieve document based on service request description:

https://gateway.watsonplatform.net/retrieve-and-rank/api/v1/solr_clusters/sce5325126_b64b_4141_af68_31af26cf7683/solr/example-collection/select?q=Outlook%20performs%20slowly%20when%20you%20open%20email%20messages&wt=json&fl=id,body

by a simple REST client using Apache HttpClient :

public void callRESTAPIRetrieveAndRank(String SRdesc) throws ClientProtocolException, IOException {

        . . .
        HttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient();
        HttpPost post = new HttpPost("https://c0076286-3009-40c2-886f-bf6d8338ZZYYY:[email protected]/retrieve-and-rank/api/v1/solr_clusters/sce5325126_b64b_4141_af68_31af26cf7683/solr/example-collection/select?q=mail&wt=json&fl=id,body");
        post.setHeader("Accept", "application/json");
        post.setHeader("Content-type", "application/json");
        StringEntity input = new StringEntity(""); 
        post.setEntity(input);
 
        HttpResponse response = client.execute(post);
        System.out.println("REST API invoked");
 
        BufferedReader rd = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(response.getEntity().getContent()));
        String line = "";
 
        while ((line = rd.readLine()) != null) {
           System.out.println(line);
 
        // Maximo custom code here
        }
        . . .
}

So my Proof Of Concept use IBM Watson as support to IBM Control Desk to manage for example the service request SR2015-12:

“Outlook performs slowly when you open email messages”

the button-pressed event action calls the IBM Watson to find relevant results quickly from large numbers of documents to address the Service Request.

These are the results:

But there are times when Outlook goes down in a ball of flames. When that happens, if you don't have a bevy of tricks to pull out of your pocket, you might find yourself in a world of pain. But troubleshooting Outlook doesn't have to be a nightmare. In fact, you can almost script out the troubleshooting process with these 10 handy tips. 1: Scan PST Those PST files will inevitably develop errors. When they do, they can prevent Outlook from working properly. When Outlook is starting to fuss, one of the first things I do is run scanpst.exe against each PST file used within Outlook. But be warned: Scan PST can take some time to run. It has to back up your data file, scan for errors, and repair any errors found. If the data file is large, this process can take quite some time. To run Scan PST, you'll need to locate the scanpst.exe executable. (Its location will depend upon the version of Windows being used.)

If Outlook is connecting to either an Exchange server or IMAP account, this process is just a matter of deleting the profile and re-adding it. To do this, open the Control Panel, go to Mail | Profiles, and delete the profile.

Are you looking for free e-mail but don't know where to start? Do you use Gmail but want to use it more effectively? Do you want to organize your emails better? Spending too much time on your email? Then this guide is for you! This is the complete illustrated guide to setting and using Gmail

From application point of view the service request fields are populated with the solution documents retrieved from Watson:

That’s all !

I think with the cognitive approach and tools it is possible to have a real understanding of the client needs and the quality of service desk management can improve dramatically.

Your comments and suggestions are welcome !