Towards a Unifying Process Framework for Services Knowledge Management

Abstract

Abstract. Activities concerned with the design, planning and execution of services are becoming increasingly complex. This is due to the involvement of many different stakeholders, the complexity of the service systems themselves, and the dynamic nature of their organizational and ICT environments. Service knowledge management helps share and reuse relevant knowledge among the different stakeholders, and therefore emerges as a critical factor to perform service activities with required efficiency and quality. Recent advances in knowledge management provide promising opportunities to support individual service activities within a single domain. Yet, sharing knowledge throughout the service life-cycle and across service domains is still very challenging. The source of service knowledge, its usage, update frequency, encoding and associated stakeholders may vary depending upon the service activity and the service domain. Based on a critical analysis of currently proposed frameworks, we argue that a process framework approach is beneficial for service knowledge management. To support our claim, we offer an abstract template and a typical service life-cycle that can be adopted to integrate heterogeneous service knowledge from diverse sources.

A systemic framework for supporting cross-disciplinary efforts in services research

“…Laudable efforts such as the IfM and IBM's Service Science Management and Engineering (SSME) efforts [6], have still not engaged with key communities, for example the growing PSS community, or work in the Design community [15,37,49]. Yet this does not prevent these fields claiming that their concepts generalise to cover other fields [7,50].…”

Developing a Services Science Graduation Programme at the University of Twente

“…Courses related to Services Science can be arranged and classified in many possible ways. For example, the classification could be based on the distinction between (i) different service activities carried out by service professionals in the service lifecycle, (ii) different theories, techniques or management strategies employed in these service activities, or (iii) different service disciplines [11] involved in the application of the theories, techniques or strategies. Since Services Science is essentially multidisciplinary, we realised that (ii) and (iii) are probably not the most suitable approaches for classification.…”

“…Our underlying assumption is that our teaching goals should allow the students to pursue these professional skills. In order to judge whether the identified service activities are sufficient we used the service life-cycle that we reported in [11]. This life-cycle is supposed to be general enough to be applied to both social and computational services.…”