Towards a Unifying Process Framework for Services Knowledge Management

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.