Representation of knowledge in information technology Service Capability Maturity Model (IT Service CMM)

Abstract

There has been a sharp emphasis in recent literature on the values that appropriate levels of collaboration and knowledge sharing can potentially generate for todaypsilas organisations. On the other hand, organisations are adopting IT Service Capability Maturity Model (IT Service CMM) for managing their service-level processes at an increasing rate. At the time of writing, no explicit method existed within the current version of the IT Service CMM framework for addressing knowledge sharing and collaboration requirements of the actors involved in various service-level processes. In this paper, conceptual modeling language is selected and then applied to the IT Service CMM in order to enable identification of the collaboration requirements of various entities. This in turn is expected to enhance the quality and consistency of service delivery in IT service organisations that utilise the IT Service CMM. In order to evaluate and assess suitability of the selected modeling language in representing the collaboration context surrounding the IT Service CMM environment, the Conceptual Model Quality Framework (CMQF) was utilised. The aim of this evaluation method is to iteratively assess, and then enhance, the syntactic correctness, semantic quality, and pragmatism of the selected conceptual modeling language when applied to the IT Service CMM. The findings from the first iteration suggested that the proposed conceptual modeling language produced highly syntactically correct process models for the corresponding processes specified by the IT Service CMM, however it was moderately successful in completely demonstrating all aspects of the IT Service CMM. These results also suggest that the resulting knowledge representation models were difficult for their target audience to comprehend initially. As a result, a set of reffined process models were developed that improved the initial knowledge representations.