Understanding Customer Requirements - An Enterprise Knowledge Graph Approach

Abstract

Understanding customers demands and needs is one of the keys to success for large enterprises. Customers come to a large enterprise with a set of requirements and finding a mapping between the needs they are expressing and the scale of available products and services within the enterprise is a complex task. Formalizing the two sides of interaction - the requests and the offerings - is a way to achieve the matching. Enterprise Knowledge Graphs (EKG) are an effective method to represent enterprise information in ways that can be more easily interpreted by both humans and machines. In this work, we propose a solution to identify customer requirements from free text to represent them in terms of an EKG. We demonstrate the validity of the approach by matching customer requirements to their appropriate business units, using a dataset of historical requirement-offering records in IBM spanning over 10 years.