Resources for Action: A Resource-Based View of Service Systems

Computer, 2007

2007 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'07), 2007

All large vendors of standard business software have announced to move to service oriented architecture. They claim benefits for their customers with regard to agility and openness. In contrast to the design of software services which has been a focus of research in the computer science community in recent years, the design of enterprise services has not been addressed as much by the information systems research community. This paper outlines a research program on the design of enterprise services. The necessity of different service understandings on different layers of enterprise architecture is shown, conceptual foundations for the design of enterprise services are presented, and first results of developing a method for enterprise service design are proposed.

2006

A broader use of e-services for cross enterprise collaboration requires the services to be analysed and designed with a clear business focus. From a business perspective, the e-services must support the primary values that an organization strives for. From an operational perspective, the e-services must be devised such that they support the day-to-day activities in the business. In this paper, we report on an effort to use value models and "service process models" as the foundation for analysis and design of e-services. Value models facilitate the exploration of new e-services, whereas service process models relate e-services to specific activities in an organization's business processes. We elicited a set of principles and models for analysis and design of e-services, and we discussed the experiences of practicing the principles in a project from the health sector. Having a well-defined alignment of software and business values provides benefits for service requirement gathering, service identification and service validation.

Advances in Production Management Systems …, 2010

For a long time, it was highlighted that the service is intangible or immaterial; these characteristics are mainly used to distinguish the service, making it incomparable with good. The set of proposed definitions and characteristics that led to debates between specialists in economics for several years and gave place to a variety of visions and approaches are still not consensual and science engineers challenge. Goal of this paper is to present, on the one hand, the existing literature proposed by economists concerning services (definitions and specificities) and, on the other, arguments proposed by science engineers that challenge them. That study allows us to propose a generic definition of what a service is and a preliminary model of a service activity.

2000

The rationale behind service oriented computing is to lift inter-organisational integration on a higher level of effectiveness and efficiency. E-services promise to offer means for floating modularisation of arbitrary organisational assets into components that can be dynamically offered, discovered, negotiated, accessed and composed in an open environment. From a technical point of view electronic services are software systems that have

IGI Global eBooks, 2011

The purpose of this study is to define generic service processes, their system, and a scope of service science developed originally by the author. In the presented approach, the main criterion is the class of serviced users, since this leads to the six kinds of process recognition and eventually helps in planning e-service systems' architecture. E-service system (e-SS) is defined as a mission-goal-strategy-driven configuration of technology, organizational processes and networks designed to deliver HTservicesT H that satisfy the needs, wants, or aspirations of customers. Marketing, operations, and global environment considerations have significant implications for the design of an e-service system. Four criteria which impact e-service systems' architecture have been defined as: service business model, customer contact and level of involvement (Service User Interface), service provider's enterprise complexity (Enterprise Systems and Networks), and scope of goods involved in service. It was proved that the e-service system is the intermediary layer between Service User Interface and Enterprise Systems and Networks. Two examples of e-SS have been modeled.

2009

Service and service systems concepts are fundamental constructs for the development of the emergent SSME, ITSM, and Service Oriented Software (SOS) knowledge streams. A diversified literature has provided a richness of findings, but at the same time, the lack of standardized conceptualizations is a source of confusion to IT practitioners and academics. Given this problematic situation, we pose that a systems approach is useful to address it. In this article, we review and synthesize key studies in these knowledge streams to design: (i) a framework to characterize both concepts under a system view and, (ii) harmonized definitions (e.g. identification of shared and essential properties) for such fundamental concepts. Our main contribution is scholastic, but we are confident that the posed conceptual artifacts can be further used to elaborate standardized definition for the IT service and IT service system constructs, as well as analysis tools for describe real service systems. [Article copies are available for purchase from InfoSci-on-Demand.com]

Services are the vital part of a service-oriented architecture. Their development and design are essential parts of the development and implementation of a service-oriented architecture. Thus, numerous approaches in research and practice exist that refer to different aspects of service design. These are focused on specific needs or aspects in service design. According to the literature review provided in this paper, no single service design approach covers all the aspects that are needed for the implementation and deployment of a service-oriented architecture. Beside the literature review this paper provides a service design approach that combines the existing methods and approaches. The goal is its further development towards a service design method for service design in research and industry.

Although the importance of Service-Dominant (S-D) logic is recently recognized among service designers, they still have barriers in applying the perspective to design practices due to the lack of appropriate tools and techniques to operationalize its conceptual strengths. To advance the integration of S-D logic into service design, this paper introduces a resourceoriented service design approach that focuses on representing and reconfiguring value cocreation. In particular, a service ideation technique called ROSI, along with two representation tools named resource integration map and resource availability table, is developed based on the concepts of resource integration (Vargo & Lusch, 2008) and value constellation (Norman & Ramirez, 1993), and the characterization of discontinuous service innovation from the perspective of S-D logic (Michel, Brown, & Gallen, 2008). This paper then shows how the introduced approach facilitates the ideation of innovative services and also discusses its future research possibilities.

School of Information, 2007

The services sector was initially defined as a tertiary and residual economic category after agriculture and manufacturing. As many disciplines struggled to define, model and design for services, it became clear that the foundational emphasis was on person-to-person interactions like those between customer and hairdresser, mechanic or accountant. But in recent years, the category of services has grown to encompass selfservice technologies and web-based services, mandating a broader analysis of this field. Rather than add new categories to the classification of services, we must rethink the basic concepts and introduce new ones that more richly capture the complexity of services design and delivery, regardless of the actors, be it people, information or technology. Every "moment of truth" between service provider and consumer is a result of a value chain of services, divided between the front-and back-stages, where information plays a crucial role from start to finish. Understanding the service system in which this value chain exists, the actors, and how information flows through its structure is the new foundation for effectively applying a service design methodology. This paper proposes a holistic approach to services design intended for the renovation of existing, information-intensive services. The methodology considers the often competing interests of the front-stage, consumer experience of services, with the back-stage, processes and information technology driven services that are invisible to the service consumer. Contents