Knowledge Management for Services Transitions

In this paper, service transition stands for the process of taking over responsibility for management and enhancement of a client´s IT applications. While more and more clients see benefits in outsourcing their IT applications, the competition between providers of application management services grows fiercer. Here, an efficient transition process provides a substantial competitive advantage, and effective knowledge transfer and management are its crucial ingredients. We have identified two potential obstacles to effective knowledge transfer: (1) the client´s application knowledge may not explicitly and transparently be available, and (2) the provider´s knowledge management approach may be distributed and highly fluctuating teams may lack proper technology and discipline. In this paper, we present a method to harvest, share and grow application knowledge systematically; an architecture to store, link, and access knowledge efficiently; as well as a management model to reward generation and consumption of application knowledge.