The nature of knowledge-intensive person-oriented services – Challenges for leveraging service engineering potentials

Abstract

Knowledge-intensive person-oriented services (KIPOS) are predominately existent in sectors such as health care, home care or education. They are of high economic relevance in terms of market size and growth. Yet they are laggards in terms of leveraging typical service engineering potentials as applying (partial) automation, process standardization or customer integration techniques, since the most value creating activities in service provision are bound to persons or personal knowledge. In this paper, we first analyze existing typologies from literature and derive a characteristic profile of KIPOS. Next to this, we present specific challenges for KIPOS engineering derived from qualitative interviews with service providers and observations. Our results can serve as an input for developing service engineering methods for KIPOS.