Business Commons^™

Service System Fundamentals: Work System, Value Chain, And Life Cycle, Steven Alter

Business Analytics and Information Systems

Service systems produce all services of significance and scope, yet the concept of a service system is not well articulated in the service literature. This paper presents three interrelated frameworks as a first attempt to define the fundamentals of service systems. These frameworks identify basic building blocks and organize important attributes and change processes that apply across all service systems. Although relevant regardless of whether a service system uses information technology, the frameworks are also potentially useful in visualizing the realities of moving toward automated service architectures. This paper uses two examples, one largely manual and one highly automated, to …