Axel Kieninger of the Universitat Karlsruhe had the first presentation after lunch, discussing processes for service creators and consumers (or prosumers) to collaboratively co-create services in order to raise the value of the services to the consumer. There are a number of barriers to collaboration, primarily those of cultural differences and specialized or standards tools/notation. By using Semantic MediaWiki as a collaboration platform, both collaboration and formal annotation are supported, providing functionality that supports specialized notation while encouraging participation.
In many cases, design of IT services and the accompanying SLAs was done without proper participation of the business units, which in turn led to the business complaining of lack of alignment between business and IT. In the author’s Semantic MediaWiki scenario, they can catalog the services and their SLAs, report on service performance, and document service proposals. This allowed the business to more easily add their feedback and suggestions on the services provided by IT.
This is more about the collaboration on and documentation of manual processes that may have some automated tasks, as opposed to structured processes: the processes in this case are descriptive, with those descriptions being developed in a collaborative manner using Semantic MediaWiki. The use of Semantic MediaWiki rather than a standard wiki platform allows additional attributes to be associated with content, including class hierarchies and semantic properties; the inline query language allows interactive queries on the semantic properties and classes, such as locating related services, process owners and process participants, to be represented dynamically in another wiki page.