# Gaining Insights into Conceptual Models: A Graph-Theoretic Querying Approach
## 5 Use Cases for OPM Queries
### Business Process Optimization Using Path Finding: The Case of the IT Support Workflow  
To explore and demonstrate possible path finding capabilities in an OPM model, we generated a workflow OPM model of handling issues by an internal Information Technology (IT) (XE \"IT:Information Technology\") support organization and its customers within a large enterprise. In large enterprises, IT support is a service organization in and of itself, often comprised of multiple units. These are sub-organizations staffed by professionals with unique support skill sets, such as experts in a High-Performance Computing environment for design customers, networking solutions for office and data centers, notebooks, and enterprise applications. To get an IT support service, the customer (an enterprise employee) must generate an IT service ticket, which should be addressed to the person with the relevant support skill. The ticket lifecycle includes one or more support levels that are involved in the ticket resolution, where Level 1 and Level 2 are basic support units, often located in emerging markets. It is expected that most of the tickets will be resolved at these levels. Level 3 support teams are usually engineering teams, which, in many cases, are co-located with  
Figure 10: Neighborhood OPM query result of the fault-aware **Steam Generating** model. the customers. To reduce Level 3 engineering teams' overhead and context switching, a customer must first go through Level 1 and Level 2 support. Customers who are not always aware what is the adequate support skill level they need for their current incident or request have difficulty creating a service ticket and prefer direct contact with a Level 3 support team member. Since most customers are located next to Level 3 teams, direct interaction with someone familiar sounds easier than going into the seemingly long route of ticket issuing. They use email or instant messaging methods to ask for the relevant support skill, expecting that the contacted IT person will be able to solve their problem quicker, without having to issue a service ticket. To deal with this situation, the enterprise IT organization created a web application via an \"IT Portal\", with support categories that are determined based on the customer's issue or request and on the required IT support skill. The requested service is categorized and routed to the relevant support skill. For example, if a customer selected an issue classified as belonging to the Wi-Fi category, the system will generate a ticket and route it to the office networking team. The system diagram (SD), the top-level OPD of the OPM system model in Figure 11, describes the agent **End-User** who **owns** an **Incident** with the initial state **unresolved**. The **Incident Resolving** process changes it to **resolved** using the instrument **Incident Resolving System**. The in-zoomed process **Incident Resolving** in Figure 12 exposes the process **IT Contacting**, which yields **Contact Method** at one of the states **IT Portal** or **IT Personnel**. If the state is **IT Portal**, the **Automatic IT Skill Classifying** process is executed using the instrument **Incident Resolving System**. If the **Contact Method** is **IT Personnel**, **Manual IT Skill Classifying** is performed. This process is in-zoomed in Figure 13, exposing three subprocesses: **IT Personnel Contacting**, **Issue Reviewing**, and **Required IT Skill Classifying**. Via the **IT Personal Contacting** process, the **End-User** agent changes **Level 3 IT Personnel** from being at state **issue-unaware** to the issue-aware state. The process also invokes **Issue Reviewing**, which changes **Level 3 IT Personnel** from issue-aware to **issue-understood**. The last process, **Required IT Skill Classifying**, changes the stateful object **Required IT Skill** to state **classified**. Both scenarios lead to a change of the stateful informational object **Required IT Skill** from its initial state **unclassified** to **classified**.