What is Service-Oriented Design

The success of today’s enterprises, measured in terms of their ability to learn and to apply lessons learned, is highly dependent on the inner workings and capabilities of their information technology (IT) function. This is largely due to the emergence of the digital economy (Ghosh, 2006; Turban, Leidner, McLean, & Wetherbe, 2005), characterized by a highly competitive and turbulent business environment, inextricably driven by the intra- and inter-organizational processes and the knowledge processing activities they support. One consequence is the increase in organizations’ efforts to deliberately manage knowledge (Tapscott, 1997), especially the intellectual capital (Stewart, 1997) of their employees (De Hoog, van Heijst, van der Spek, et al., 1999), which necessarily deals with the conceptualization, review, consolidation, and action phases of creating, securing, combining, coordinating, and retrieving knowledge. In fact, such efforts must be instrumental to creating an efficient organization model based on some innovative initiative, and then enable the organization to launch and learn. In a knowledge-creating organization (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995), employees are expected to continually improvise, and invent new methods to deal with unexpected problems and share these innovations with other employees through some effective channels of communications or knowledge transfer mechanisms. The key is collaboration, implying that organizational knowledge is created only when individuals keep modifying their knowledge through interactions with other organizational members. The challenge that organizations now face is how to devise suitable information systems (IS) support to enable such collaboration, namely, to turn the scattered, diverse knowledge of their people into welldocumented knowledge assets ready for reuse to benefit the whole organization. This article presents some service-oriented perspectives of employee-based collaboration through the design of specific IS support called the Organizational Memory Information System (OMIS) in light of the peculiar open-source development initiative of Wiki technology (Leuf & Cunningham, 2001).