Preface for the Third Edition - Read

7. Systems 303
see also (Alonso 2004, 124). Web services are one way of implementing business
and technical services in a service-oriented architecture. A service-oriented architecture
is based on the concepts of an application frontend, services, service repository
and service bus (Krafzig et al., 2005, 57) which together make business and
technical functions available as independent services that can be accessed without
any information about their implementation.
The service concept has had a profound impact on enterprise application integration,
on business-to-business applications and generally on the way information
and communication infrastructures are designed and managed from a technical perspective
(e.g., Cox/Kreger 2005). In addition to this technical impact, “SOAenabled”
businesses and organizations are sometimes called agile, on-demand or
service-oriented enterprises, metaphors that attempt to carry over SOA semantics
to organizational design (Bieberstein et al. 2005) which has connotations for
changes in IT’s general role in business (transforming business models), value creation
(value networks), business processes (dynamically designed, net-like with
emphasis on parallel processing) as well as organizational structure (service consumer-provider
relationship complementing or even replacing traditional hierarchies;
Cherbakov et al. 2005, 659). In the following, this section will concentrate
on the specifics of the service concept applied to KMS (see also Maier/Remus
2007).
KM services are a subset of services offered in an organization, both basic and
composed, whose functionality supports high-level KM instruments as part of ondemand
KM initiatives. Examples for these services are find expert, submit experience,
publish skill profile, revisit learning resource or join community-of-interest.
Services are offered by service providers that procure the service implementations,
supply their service descriptions, and provide the necessary support. Often, KM
services cater to the special needs of one or a small number of organizational units,
e.g., a process, a work group, a department, a subsidiary, a factory or an outlet in
order to provide a solution to a defined business problem. KM services describe
individual aspects of KM instruments implemented in heterogeneous application
systems that can be combined into an enterprise knowledge infrastructure.
492. In distributed systems, service-oriented architectures can be seen as successors of component
architectures. The underlying conceptual change could also trigger a paradigm
shift from a primarily production-oriented view, not only of software production, to a
view that takes into account the specifics of the service sector which has experienced
growth during the last decades as opposed to the production sector which has declined.
There is currently an initiative led by IBM and Oracle, but also involving institutions
such as the European Commission, that aim at defining a research agenda for so-called
services sciences. This agenda should bring the vision of a service-led economy to the
focus of a number of scientific disciplines. Thus, the service concept transcends the scientific
disciplines of computer science and information systems and also involves disciplines
such as management, economics or service engineering.