Integrating Knowledge Management Services: Strategy and Infrastructure

Abstract

Many organizations have established knowledge management initiatives, but most of them have developed instruments bottom-up, often in parallel and without strategic considerations. Many of those instruments involve information and communication technologies (ICT) which therefore are fragmented and cannot be easily reused outside their original intended organizational unit. This chapter proposes a three-layered service infrastructure that composes services from heterogeneous applications into specific knowledge management (KM) services. The infrastructure supports discovery, call, and provision of KM services from activities within business processes. It argues that integration of KM services in organizations requires alignment of the IT infrastructure, particularly its knowledge-oriented part, with the KM portion of business strategy, that is, KM strategy. This alignment can be achieved by introducing a service infrastructure that uses the concept of KM service in order to connect the customer-oriented materialization of strategic decisions on a conceptual level, that is, business processes, with their technical counterpart on the ICT level, that is, software services.