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.