The Challenge
The move to product-service delivery presents a significant challenge. The process of full through-life support depends crucially upon the integration of a network of organisations (both private and public), including specialised component suppliers, subcontractors and service providers. This network is subject to change and has its own life cycle. In the space of a product life of 20 years or more there is a natural turnover of staff and organisations. The environment within which the network operates will change due to evolving customer requirements, environmental contexts and business needs; and the software and hardware infrastructure upon which both the product and the network are built will shift constantly. In the context of this new environment, products are upgraded, refurbished, re-manufactured and used for different purposes, and, more importantly, systems are persistent - they outlive products - and the information associated with products or particular sub-systems is reused for future generations of products (Siemieniuch and Sinclair, 2002, Sivaloganathan and Shahin, 1998)
The challenge is how can products be best designed and supported in this dynamic, network-focused environment. There are two key issues that companies have to face. The first is how to ensure the information created and the knowledge gained during the design and subsequent operation of the product remain accessible throughout the whole life of the product to the diverse community that may require access. The second is how to ensure that there are in place appropriate organisational resources and decision-making approaches to work most effectively in the new business paradigm. This research proposal addresses each of these issues. The research challenge is to establish a holistic framework for the design and use of information and knowledge-support systems within the new and evolving landscape of the long and total product-service life cycle.
At the heart of this proposal lies the contested distinction between knowledge and information. Despite considerable scholarly effort, universal definitions continue to prove problematic. Davenport and Prusak (1997) have been influential in arguing that knowledge is best characterised as an act or a process rather than an artefact or a thing. Knowledge therefore cannot be separated from doing and exists as a dynamic within closely connected networks of practitioners. This interpretation is adopted to provide working definitions for the purposes of the proposed research. The distinction is further useful in defining two distinct approaches to knowledge management (KM) characterised by different epistemological assumptions (McMahon et al. 2004a; Hansen et al., 1999) The first is based on 'codification' and is concerned with making knowledge explicit through its capture and formal representation. There is an extensive literature relating to the codification of design knowledge and product representation through engineering documents, models and knowledge bases (McMahon and Browne, 1998, Culley et al. 2001, Wallace et al. 2004). In contrast, the second approach is based on 'personalisation' and is concerned with the development of communities of practice and socio-technical models for enhancing company performance (Siemieniuch and Sinclair, 2004; Wenger, 1998). Personalisation and codification go hand in hand; both are necessary but only together are they sufficient. The recognition of the validity of both approaches leads naturally to the proposed commitment in the research to methodological pluralism.
