Empowering Service Organizations by Integrating Creativity and Knowledge Management into the Service Development Process — Solutions for an integrated management of creativity and knowledge in the service process — Thomas Schlegel Fraunhofer IAO Stuttgart Thomas.Schlegel@iao.fraunhofer.de Alexander Karapidis Fraunhofer IAO Stuttgart Alexander.Karapidis@iao.fraunhofer.de H. Holger Rath empolis GmbH Kaiserslautern Holger.Rath@empolis.com Carsten Ritterskamp Ruhr University of Bochum Bochum Carsten.Ritterskamp@rub.de Abstract The increasing need for a fast development of new and high-quality services has led to structured approaches like service engineering. While some important dimensions like knowledge management have found their way into service development and service delivery as a separate domain, an integration of creativity, knowledge management and learning into the complete service engineering process and lifecycle has not been considered in theory or practice. The LIKE project aims at overcoming this shortcoming by integrating creativity, knowledge and learning as inherent dimensions into the process and supports this with a platform underpinning the complete process. 1 Introduction During the last years, the markets for services changed drastically in their structures and competition situations. New information and communication technologies, globalization and the transformation of production companies to service production companies moved the service industry into the focus of scientific research. The development of standardized services, in a way as it is known from product development, emerged worldwide in the 1990s (Mörschel, 2004). Integrated service development is crucial for the success of knowledge-intensive companies operating in highly advanced economies and a precondition for efficiency in future competition. Like in the Software Engineering domain, it has become clear that a structured, process-like approach will be necessary to support a methodic approach and reproducibility as well as method and tool integration. It is the task of the LIKE project to develop a platform for integrated service development. 2 Service engineering process and its artifacts One approach is the three-phased service engineering (SE) process, which we have chosen and adapted to fit the requirements in context of the LIKE project. 2.1 Three phases From the LIKE point of view, the development of a new service cuts into three phases. There are different tasks in each phase, enabling a standardized generation of services. The common bases for all phases are the aspects creativity, learning and knowledge management. These aspects are crucial for and must be taken into account within each phase of the SE process. Following this model the development of services forms a three-step process: • Service creation (plan) • Service engineering (build) • Service management (run) Schlegel, T.; Karapidis, A.; Rath, H.; Ritterskamp, C. (2005), Empowering Service Organizations by Integrating Creativity and Knowledge Management into the Service Development Process, In: Salvendy, G. (Ed.): Online-Proceedings HCI International 2005, Mahwah,NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.