Consultant-as-a-service: an interactive and context-driven approach to mobile decision support services

This paper presents a new generation of decision support services where techniques from software agents, semantic analysis, and data mining are orchestrated through a new cloud-based concept namely ”Consultant-as-a-Service”. The proposed concept will be offered as a set of new cloud application program interfaces that coach the user, who is not familiar with an organization, to effectively select the desired organization’s business services and seamlessly connect them with the proper third-party applications (e.g., map, search engine, calendar, email, voice, video) in the user’s mobile device (smart phone or tablet). Such consultant services can be provided for a variety of strategic business domains such as: banking, insurance, government, healthcare, and on-line shopping. A prototype mobile service has been developed using iOS for iPhone.