An Interactive and Collaborative Approach to Answering Questions for an Organization

Many organizations regularly have to answer questions from their clients. While clients complain that they spend too much time navigating the organization's infrastructure to get answers, the organization's experts feel overwhelmed because they have to answer the same questions repeatedly or they receive questions that are irrelevant or marginal to their expertise. As the organization's body of expertise grows and market competition increases, there is an urgent need to satisfy the clients quickly and use the experts eeciently. To address this need, we have developed an approach to building web-based managers of online textual expertise, called Information Exchange systems. These systems act as intermediaries between the organization's clients and experts. They provide the clients with access to online textual expertise through interactive question-answering. They allow the experts to modify the existing textual expertise and to collaborate on the incoming questions. In this paper, we describe an emerging World Wide Web application, called the Chicago Information Exchange, that manages the online textual expertise of the University of Chicago Computer Science Department and acts as a web-based intermediary between its clients and experts.