With the advent of more light-weight technologies for connecting contents and functions provided by diverse application systems, called mashups, also individuals with their personal knowledge environments can benefit from arranging services flexibly to help them fulfil their knowledge needs. These personal, collaborative initiatives are often associated with trial-and-error, grass-roots level approaches which need an organizational and technical infrastructure to guide them without loosing the momentum created in these fragmented knowledge management activities performed by individuals, communities or in projects in an organization. Based on a discussion of these issues, this paper outlines the foundations for a knowledge service governance model to guide these activities.
The knowledge maturing model views learning activities as embedded into, interwoven with, and even indistinguishable from everyday work processes. Learning is understood as an inherently social and collaborative activity. The Knowledge Maturing Process Model structures this process into five phases: expressing ideas, distributing in communities, formalizing, ad-hoc learning and standardization. It is applicable not only for content but also to process knowledge and semantics. In the MATURE IP two toolsets will be develop that support the maturing process: a personal learning environment and an organisation learning environment integrating the levels of individuals, communities and organisation. The development is guided by the SER theory of seeding, evolutionary growth and reseeding and is based on generally applicable maturing services.
On the one hand models can be used as navigational tools respecting mental processing capabilities of persons. On the other hand models can be analyzed automatically by information systems to deduce relevant content for knowledge management IT-components as E-Learning-Applications, KM-Portals, document management systems, etc. Therefore models of knowledge intensive business processes are a natural integration layer for persons and information systems providing the relevant context to interpret and handle information the right way. It has only to be solved how to interface these models efficiently from a person as well as from an information system point of view.