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Science of service systems as an artifactual science

January 31, 2009
6 Comments

In his writing, Jim Spohrer has referred to The Sciences of the Artificial, written by Herbert Simon in 1996 as foundational to a science of services systems. Due to other priorities, I’ve been try to dodge following through into Simon’s book. Such work isn’t without controversies, such as described by Jude Chua Soo Meng in “Donald Schön, Herbert Simon and The Sciences of the Artificial” published in Design Studies in January 2009. Chua writes:

Donald Schön[‘s] book The Reflective Practitioner (1983) criticized the very technical view of design influenced by logical positivism, and urged design studies to attend to reflection-in-practice. In great part, Schön’s influential criticism was directed at the 1969, 1st edition of Herbert Simon’s The Sciences of the Artificial.

Chua describes revisions in the 1996 third revision of The Sciences of the Artificial that resolves the issues. This is deeper than I’d like to go.

I have to admit that I didn’t fully understand the use of the word “artificial”. Colloquially, “artificial” can be understood to mean something not genuine or made in imitation. Alternatively, it can be opposed to natural, as something man-made or made with human skill. This second meaning became clearer to me as I was reading Sarasvathy et al. “Designing Organizations that Design Environments”, from Organization Studies 2008:

A science of the artificial (or an artifactual science) studies some subset of human artifacts. [p. 331]

The expression of “artifactual” over “artificial” is significant for me, because it bridges sociological research (i.e.… Read more (in a new tab)

Service Science, and Service Oriented Architecture

November 28, 2008
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Some months ago, Kelly Lyons recommended me as a panelist for a workshop at Cascon 2008 on “SOA Research Challenges: Current Progress and Future Challenges”, on the topic of Service Science, Management and Engineering. I found that Cascon workshops share existing knowledge and develop new knowledge — in contrast to paper presentations about completed work. The workshop was described in the following way:

This workshop will identify critical SOA research challenges that need to be addressed by the research community for SOA to fulfill its promise. The workshop will present a taxonomy of SOA research issues that will be used to frame the rest of the discussion. The workshop will focus on research needs that are currently causing the greatest pain for SOA practitioners. Topics will include “hard problems”, tooling issues, governance challenges, monitoring through the life cycle, and the longer-term evolution of SOA. The workshop will include presentations by practitioners and the research community in addressing critical unmet issues.

Most of the time, my research work and day job are only loosely coupled. In the Cascon context, my longer-horizon organizational and economic thinking was to be applied with more immediate question issues related to technology. I was given the following outline to as a suggestion for my talk:

  • Overview of the topic, in this case SSME
  • Why is it important to talk about this (rationale)
  • How it relates to SOA
  • What are current efforts in establishing this relationship
  • Challenges and gaps.
… Read more (in a new tab)

Coproduction, interactive value, offering, value constellation

May 15, 2008
7 Comments

In the pursuit of gaining a stronger understanding of a science of service systems through systems science, I’ve been working my way through the works of Richard Normann, Rafael Ramirez and Johan Wallin. There’s a long evolution of thought there, with a depth that may not be obvious to readers who aren’t systems scientists. Thus, phrases such as coproduction, interactive value, offering and value constellation have a specific meaning within the systems science community that the layman may not appreciate. Let me try to bring together some of the ideas, across the references.

  • 1. A service system includes a supplier with a customer (and possibly subcontractors) as coproducers of outcomes
  • 2. Interactive value is actualized not in coproduction of the supplier with customer, but in coproduction of the customer with his/her customer / counterparts
  • 3. Offerings are interactions that provide benefits in the form of (a) physical product, (b) service and infrastructure and (c) interpersonal relationship
  • 4. An offering can be either an output of coproduction, or input into coproduction
  • 5. A value constellation includes the supplier, customer and subcontractors as coproducers

The systems flavour comes out not only in recognizing parts within the service system, but in emphasizing the interactions between parts. It’s worth re-examining these writings in the context of a new science of service systems.

Science of service systems, service sector, service economy

May 6, 2008
13 Comments

As Service Science, Management and Engineering (SSME) has been developing, I’ve noticed a refinement of language. Rather than just abbreviating the long clause to service science, I’m now careful to use the phrase of a science of service systems, following Spohrer, Maglio et. al (2007). There’s a clear definition of service system in the final April 2008 revision of the report by the University of Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing.

What is a service system?
A service system can be defined as a dynamic configuration of resources (people, technology, organisations and shared information) that creates and delivers value between the provider and the customer through service. In many cases, a service system is a complex system in that configurations of resources interact in a non-linear way. Primary interactions take place at the interface between the provider and the customer. However, with the advent of ICT, customer-to-customer and supplier-to-supplier interactions have also become prevalent. These complex interactions create a system whose behaviour is difficult to explain and predict. [p. 6]

I’ve been sorting through the significance of this service system orientation, and have reached the following personal points-of-view.

  • 1. The definition of a service system as a system is earnest
  • 2. A service system creating and delivering value emphasizes a value constellation perspective over a value chain perspective
  • 3. Research into service systems is muddled in the ideas of coproduction and (value) cocreation
  • 4. A service system creates value with an offering as a platform for co-production
  • 5.
… Read more (in a new tab)

System envisioning: disclosing a collective future system

August 22, 2007
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Much of the challenge of getting an organization to move forward is in establishing a collective understanding of what the joint future might be. I’ve been intrigued by the idea of system envisioning since I participated in some OOPSLA workshops in the late 1990s. Ralph Hodgson provided me with permission to repost a workshop summary where many of the ideas first came alive for me.

The idea of vision certainly isn’t new for businesses. My concern is that many visions never materialize, and lots of effort and resources get wasted. Two factors that contribute toward success are:

Value-creating systems and business models: systems thinking inside

July 6, 2007
4 Comments

On my quest for management research based on systems theory, I’ve generally been disappointed since the systems foundations are rarely apparent from a superficial reading. Typically, when I read management research, I get a queasy feeling inside, because a lot of the content written is anti-systemic.

In contrast, when I read Johan Wallin‘s 2006 book, Business Orchestration: Strategic Leadership in the Era of Digital Convergence, I felt strangely comfortable. I attribute this to the lineage from which Wallin has come, so that there is “systems thinking inside”. Wallin completed his dissertation in 2000 in association with Rafael Ramirez. Ramirez is a graduate of the Social Systems Science (S3) program1 at the University of Pennsylvania, and now a professor at Oxford. In addition, Wallin worked closely with Richard Normann, immersing him in the Value Constellation model. I suspect that the average reader would be oblivious to the fine distinctions that systems theory makes. For management researchers, however, such foundations enable a strong scientific foundation, rather than simplified metaphors that break down under scrutiny.

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      In trying to place the World Hypotheses work of Stephen C. Pepper (with multiple root metaphors), Nicholas Rescher provides a helpful positioning. — begin paste — Philosophical perspectivism maintains that substantive philosophical positions can be maintained only from a “perspective” of some sort. But what sort? Clearly different sorts of perspectives can be conceived of, […]
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