Business Commons^™

How Well Do Service Concepts Apply To Digital Services And Service Digitalization?, Steven Alter

Business Analytics and Information Systems

This paper explores the extent to which typical service concepts apply to digital service (DS) and service digitalization. It defines service, service systems, digital, digitalization, digital objects, digital agents, digital service, and service digitalization. Application of those definitions to four real world cases explores how well concepts from the service literature describe DS and service digitalization.

Using A Work System Metamodel And Usdl To Build A Bridge Between Business Service Systems And Service Computing, Steven Alter, Alistair Barros

Business Analytics and Information Systems

This paper explores the support for more comprehensive modeling of service systems than that possible through modeling methods developed through partial perspectives, with uncertainties about their wider suitability and need for integration with other methods in this domain. It responds to a Dual Call for Papers from INFORMS Service Science and IEEE Transactions on Service Computing requesting contributions that address the barely explored challenge of establishing links between business views of service systems and more technical views from service computing. Competing definitions of service reveal that most business views of service emphasize acts or outcomes produced for others, whereas a …

Work System Perspective On Service, Service Systems, It Services, And Service Science, Steven Alter

Business Analytics and Information Systems

This document explains how a “work system” perspective on systems in organizations illuminates many service topics in an understandable and broadly applicable way. It contributes to ISSIP (International Society of Service Innovation Professionals) by providing frameworks and concepts that can be used in describing, evaluating, analyzing, designing, and improving services, service systems, and IT systems.

Disentangling Service: Using A Work System Perspective To Reconcile Different But Overlapping Portrayals Of Service And Service Systems, Steven Alter

Business Analytics and Information Systems

Discussion and debate about the meaning of service, service system, IT service, and related to terms has proven inconclusive and frustrating. This preliminary draft provides insights about the nature of the problem and tries to disentangle ideas and expectations related to three portrayals of service. In a nutshell, efforts to understand service as a unitary concept tend to go in circles due to overlapping references to different but overlapping portrayals and contexts. This paper identifies three separate but somewhat overlapping portrayals of service, services as acts, services as outcomes, and services as software entities. Then it introduces a work system …

From Resources And Activities To Value For Customers Within Systems Of Service Systems, Steven Alter

Business Analytics and Information Systems

This paper addresses important challenges related to the 2013 SIG-SVC workshop’s theme, “Delivering and Managing Services in Systems of Service Systems.” It provides an operational view of systems of service systems (SOSS) in the form of a new metamodel that significantly extends previous metamodels related to work systems and service systems. An operational view of this type is necessary for understanding and analyzing existing service systems and for designing improvements and new service systems.

The metamodel’s perspective on service and service systems agrees only partially with service dominant logic and other current ideas in service science. The paper starts by …

Value Blueprint And Service Design Space For Facilitating Value Creation, Steven Alter

Business Analytics and Information Systems

A new operational perspective on fundamental concepts related to customers, service, and value differs from service-dominant logic in its approach to service systems, value creation, value co-creation, service interactions, value facilitation, and value constellations. This perspective leads to two new tools for supporting service system design: 1) A “value blueprint” uses a swimlane representation to identify where value creation occurs, recognizing that parts of value creation may occur long after service providers have produced their contributions to customer value. 2) A multidimensional design space for value facilitation identifies design dimensions that can be used for characterizing current or proposed approaches …

Genuinely Service-Oriented Enterprises: Using Work System Theory To See Beyond The Promise Of Efficient Software, Steven Alter

Business Analytics and Information Systems

The concept of service-oriented enterprise has great potential. Taken literally, however, it raises many issues, including practical difficulties of creating a service-oriented enterprise in the computer science sense and the huge leap from flexible IT infrastructure to an enterprise that is genuinely oriented toward providing services for customers and employees. This paper is a conceptual contribution showing how work system theory can help in seeing analysis and design issues beyond technical architectures that have dominated research to date. After summarizing background concepts related to service, service systems, and the vision of service-oriented enterprises, this paper explains how work system theory …

Challenges For Service Science, Steven Alter

Business Analytics and Information Systems

Service science is still in a formative stage, with many basic ideas still in flux and significant disagreements about definitions and implications of basic concepts. This paper suggests directions for progress in relation to eight problematic areas within service science. It uses five typical medical services to question typical definitions of service and service system. It suggests that service science should not privilege servitizing over productizing; that a series of design dimensions whose end-points are often associated with products or with services are more useful than yes/no distinctions between products and services; that the concept of "the customer" should be …

Metamodel For Service Analysis And Design Based On An Operational View Of Service And Service Systems, Steven Alter

Business Analytics and Information Systems

This paper presents a metamodel that addresses service system analysis and design based on an operational view of service that traverses and integrates three essential layers, service activities, service systems, and value constellations. The metamodel's service-in-operation perspective and underlying premises diverge from a view of service systems as systems of economic exchange that has appeared a number of times in the journal Service Science.

In addition to the metamodel itself, this paper's contributions include an explanation of eight premises on which it is based plus clarifications concerning concepts such as service, service system, customer, product/service, co-production and co-creation of value, …

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 service system is not well articulated in the service literature. This paper presents three interrelated frameworks as a first cut at 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 IT, 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 illustrate the potential …