Abstract
It is becoming more essential than ever for office professionals to become competent in information collection/gathering and problem solving in today's global business society. In particular, office professionals do not only assist simple chores but are also forced to make decisions as quickly and efficiently as possible in problematic situations that can end in either profit or loss to their company. Since office professionals rely heavily on their tacit knowledge to solve problems that arise in everyday business situations, it is truly helpful and efficient to refer to similar business cases from the past and share or reuse such previous business knowledge for better performance results. Case-based reasoning(CBR) is a problem-solving method which utilizes previous similar cases to solve problems. Through CBR, the closest case to the current business situation can be searched and retrieved from the case or knowledge base and can be referred to for a new solution. This reduces the time and resources needed and increase success probability. The main purpose of this study is to design a system called COKRS(Case-based reasoning Office Knowledge Recommender System) and develop a prototype for it. COKRS manages cases and their meta data, accepts key words from the user and searches the casebase for the most similar past case to the input keyword, and communicates with users to collect information about the quality of the case provided and continuously apply the information to update values on the similarity table. Core concepts like system architecture, definition of a case, meta database, similarity table have been introduced, and also an algorithm to retrieve all similar cases from past work history has also been proposed. In this research, a case is best defined as a work experience in office administration. However, defining a case in office administration was not an easy task in reality. We surveyed 10 office professionals in order to get an idea of how to define a case in office administration and found out that in most cases any type of office work is to be recorded digitally and/or non-digitally. Therefore, we have defined a record or document case as for COKRS. Similarity table was composed of items of the result of job analysis for office professionals conducted in a previous research. Values between items of the similarity table were initially set to those from researchers' experiences and literature review. The results of this study could also be utilized in other areas of business for knowledge sharing wherever it is necessary and beneficial to share and learn from past experiences. We expect this research to be a reference for researchers and developers who are in this area or interested in office knowledge recommendation system based on CBR. Focus group interview(FGI) was conducted with ten administrative assistants carefully selected from various areas of business. They were given a chance to try out COKRS in an actual work setting and make some suggestions for future improvement. FGI has identified the user-interface for saving and searching cases for keywords as the most positive aspect of COKRS, and has identified the most urgently needed improvement as transforming tacit knowledge and knowhow into recorded documents more efficiently. Also, the focus group has mentioned that it is essential to secure enough support, encouragement, and reward from the company and promote positive attitude and atmosphere for knowledge sharing for everybody's benefit in the company.
오늘의 글로벌 네트워크 비즈니스 환경에서 비서직 종사자들에게 신속 정확한 정보수집 능력과 올바른 판단력은 그 어느 때보다 필요한 역량으로 중시되고 있다. 비서직 업무 수행에 필요한 대부분의 지식은 체험지 혹은 경험지이기 때문에 비서가 주어진 문제를 해결하기 위해서 과거의 비슷한 사례를 참고하는 방법은 매우 타당한 것이며, 경험이나 선례를 적용함으로서 실패할 요인을 줄이고 문제 해결의 질을 높이는 동시에 시간을 단축시킬 수 있다. 본 연구에서는 비서 업무 수행 시 특정 문제 해결에 필요한 정보를 사례기반 추론에 근거하여 현재 문제와 가장 유사한 과거의 사례를 추천하는 시스템(COKRS : Case-based reasoning Office Knowledge Recommender System, 이하 COKRS)을 설계하고 프로토타입을 구축함을 목적으로 한다. 본 연구 결과인 COKRS는 비서직에서 뿐만 아니라 일반 사무영역에서의 지식관리 목적으로도 확대 이용 될 수 있을 것이다.
