An Intentional Approach to the Engineering of Knowledge-intensive Service Systems

Abstract

This paper presents an Intentional Architectural Framework for developing Knowledge-Intensive Service System Architectures (IAF-KISSA). This framework enables the specification and evaluation of knowledge-intensive service systems (KISS) architectures at the levels of network, performance, engagement, and activities. A chosen architecture then allows designing, developing, and adapting a KISS throughout its lifecycle. This research is motivated by the lack of service systems engineering (SSE) methods specifically created for KISS, despite their economic importance in industrialized economies. Examples of KISS include joint innovation initiatives and IT outsourcing contracts. KISS possess a number of distinctive characteristics, including: the knowledge-intensity of their processes and outputs; the inter-organizational coproduction of outputs, and the multi-stakeholder perspective that drives the evaluation of these systems’ performance. SSE aims to define and discover dynamic relationships among entities in order to plan, design, and adapt services systems to cocreate value [1,2]. SSE calls for a change in perspective in service engineering, from services as products to services as socio-technical systems where actors and resources are configured to collaboratively create value. An important challenge for the field of SSE is the creation of advanced models, methods, and tools for developing service system architectures. However, current service system architectures typically retain a functional and provider perspective on service systems operations without accounting for KISS characteristics. Using an intentional approach leads to modeling a service system in terms of agents, goals, strategies, and dependencies, thus addressing these concerns by moving from a functional to a strategic level of analysis [4]. Using an intentional approach to architecting KISS is thus ideally suited to their social and behavioral complexity. IAF-KISSA contributes a novel approach for architecting KISS, a type of service system that has hitherto been beyond the scope of SSE. Moreover, given the importance of knowledge for all types of service systems [2], IAF-KISSA could provide an innovative manner in which to architect service systems in general.