Engineering Knowledge-Intense, Person-Oriented Services - A State of the Art Analysis

This paper provides a state-of-the-art analysis of service engineering (SE) approaches for knowledgeintense person-oriented (KIPO) services, focussing on IT-enabled provision of such services. Key attributes are derived that distinguish KIPOs from other services. These attributes are integrated in a framework with regard to their applicability on KIPOs development and used for a systematic literature review. KIPOs are of high economic relevance, yet they are laggards in terms of realization of IT potentials. As the most value-creating activities in service provision are bound to persons or personal knowledge, KIPOs design is complicated. The analysis reveals several gaps in SE research. In particular, identified shortcomings of existent approaches are an insufficient level of detail, i.e. no concrete actions or methods for deployment are described, a lack of practical corroboration as well as insufficient IT support. Further, current approaches are not sufficiently equipped to handle the interplay between people-bound activities and technical components. This paper contributes to IS research by clearly identifying these gaps in SE methods. It further provides researchers with ideas for future research activities and guides practitioners in selecting methods that serve as candidates to be integrated into KIPOs development in order to leverage IT potentials more systematically and efficiently.