Empowering Recommender Systems in ITSM: A Pipeline Reference Model for AI-Based Textual Data Quality Enrichment

AI-based recommendation systems to augment working conditions in the field of IT service management (ITSM) have attracted new attention. However, many IT support organizations possess high volumes of tickets but are confronted with low quality, to which they train the underlying models of their AI systems. In particular, support tickets are documented insufficiently due to time pressure and lack of motivation. Following design science research, we design and evaluate an analytics pipeline to address the data quality issue. The pipeline can be applied to assess and extract high-quality support tickets for subsequent model training and operation. Based on a data set of 60.000 real-life support tickets from a manufacturing company, we develop the artifact, instantiate a recommender system and achieve a higher prediction performance in comparison to naïve enrichment methods. In terms of data management literature, we contribute to the understanding of assessing textual ticket data quality. By deriving a pipeline reference model, we move towards a general approach to designing machine learning-driven data quality analytics pipelines for attached recommender systems.