An intentional architectural framework for engineering knowledge-intensive service systems

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A knowledge-intensive service system (KISS) is a network of organizational and technological agents that rely on knowledge as a key resource to collaboratively create knowledge-intensive outputs and outcomes that are valuable to the system's entities. Examples of KISS include networks that form around knowledge-intensive business service (KIBS) providers and open innovation initiatives. Knowledge-intensive service activities are key components of industrialized economies, with the KIBS sector alone contributing over $80 billion to Canada's Gross Domestic Product in 2012.Traditional service engineering methods, drawn from product engineering, have been found inadequate for this type of service because of the intense interactions among human resources, technology, and organizational factors in KISS. Service systems engineering offers a potential solution to this issue, focusing on the definition and discovery of service system entities and their dynamic relationships through time. An important challenge for the field of service systems engineering is the creation of advanced models, methods, and tools for developing service systems architectures. But despite a number of contributions in this regard, we are still lacking architectural frameworks that account for key characteristics of KISS such as collaborative relationships among entities and their reliance on knowledge.This research program aims at addressing this gap by creating an Intentional Architectural Framework for the development of KISS Architectures (IAF-KISSA). The design and development of systems using the concepts of intentional agents, their goals, and the strategies used by these agents to achieve their intentions has been implemented in a number of related areas such as requirements engineering; enterprise modeling; and, service-oriented computing. Since intentional modeling requires the consideration of the various viewpoints of stakeholders and their potential conflicts, it is ideally suited to eliciting the requirements of purposeful systems such as service systems. The three objectives of the research program are to: 1) provide a formal definition of the requirements for modeling a KISS architecture; 2) create an architectural framework using an intentional approach and modeling language; and, 3) evaluate and refine the framework.The results of this program are important for the field of service engineering, allowing it to expand its scope to a key economic domain. On a practical level, IAF-KISSA will provide a formal approach for aligning functional aspects of KISS, such as resource planning, with business aspects, such as performance evaluation Moreover, given the importance of knowledge for all types of service systems, the results of this research could provide an innovative manner in which to engineer service systems in general.