Nathan S. Caswell

The service system is the basic abstraction of service science

Abstraction is a powerful thing. During the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution was built on many powerful abstractions, such as mass, energy, work, and power. During the twentieth century, the information revolution was built on many powerful abstractions, such as binary digit or bit, binary coding, and algorithmic complexity. Here, we propose an abstraction for the twenty-first century, in which there is an emerging revolution in thinking about business and economics based on a service-dominant logic. The worldview of service-dominant logic stands in sharp contrast to the worldview of the goods-dominant logic of the past, as it holds service—the application of competences for benefit of others—rather than goods to be the fundamental basis of economic exchange. Within this new worldview, we suggest the basic abstraction is the service system, a configuration of people, technologies, and other resources that interact with other service systems to create mutual value. Many systems can be viewed as service systems, including families, cities, and companies, among many others. In this paper, we show how the service-system abstraction can be used to understand how value is co-created, in the process laying the foundation for an integrated science of service.

Business artifacts: An approach to operational specification

Any business, no matter what physical goods or services it produces, relies on business records. It needs to record details of what it produces in terms of concrete information. Business artifacts are a mechanism to record this information in units that are concrete, identifiable, self-describing, and indivisible. We developed the concept of artifacts, or semantic objects, in the context of a technique for constructing formal yet intuitive operational descriptions of a business. This technique, called OpS (Operational Specification), was developed over the course of many business-transformation and business-process-integration engagements for use in IBMs internal processes as well as for use with customers. Business artifacts (or business records) are the basis for the factorization of knowledge that enables the OpS technique. In this paper we present a comprehensive discussion of business artifacts--what they are, how they are represented, and the role they play in operational business modeling. Unlike the more familiar and popular concept of business objects, business artifacts are pure instances rather than instances of a taxonomy of types. Consequently, the key operation on business artifacts is recognition rather than classification.

The Service System Is the Basic Abstraction of Service Science

Abstraction is a powerful thing. During the 19th century, the industrial revolution was built on many powerful abstractions, such as mass, energy, work, and power. During the 20th century, the information revolution was built on many powerful abstractions, such as binary digit or bit, binary coding, and algorithmic complexity. Here, we propose an abstraction that will be important to the service revolution of the 21st century: the service system, which is a configuration of people, technologies, and other resources that interact with other service systems to create mutual value. Many systems can be viewed as service systems, including families, cities, and companies, among many others. In this paper, we show how the service-system abstraction can be used to understand how value is created, in the process unifying concepts from many disciplines and creating the foundation for an integrated science of service.

Estimating value in service systems: a case study of a repair service system

The economic structure of service systems has steadily increased in complexity in recent years. This is due not only to specialization in direct material production and services offered, but also in the ownership and management of resources, the role of intangible assets such as process knowledge, and the context in which goods and services are consumed. This increase in complexity represents both a challenge and an opportunity in a service-oriented economy. In this paper, we offer a descriptive structure for the analysis of this complexity which combines graph theory and network flows with economic tools. Our analysis is based on publicly observable information and can be used to analyze service systems in terms of the value they deliver, how they deliver it, and how value can be discovered and increased. We show how this analysis can be applied (in the example of a car manufacturer and its service system for suppliers and dealerships) to improve customer satisfaction and provide options and analysis models for outsourcing decision makers.

Model driven development for business performance management

Business process integration and monitoring provides an invaluable means for an enterprise to adapt to changing conditions. However, developing such applications using traditional methods is challenging because of the intrinsic complexity of integrating large-scale business processes and existing applications. Model Driven DevelopmentTM (MDDTM) is an approach to developing applications-from domain-specific models to platform-sensitive models-that bridges the gap between business processes and information technology. We describe the MDD framework and methodology used to create the IBM Business Performance Management (BPM) solution. We describe how we apply model-driven techniques to BPM and present a scenario from a pilot project in which these techniques were applied. Technical details on models and transformation are presented. Our framework uses and extends the IBM business observation metamodel and introduces a data warehouse metamodel and other platform-specific and transformational models. We discuss our lessons learned and present the general guidelines for using MDD to develop enterprise-scale applications.

A Value Network Model for Strategic Analysis

This paper describes a new framework for modeling value network of inter-organization interactions. We propose a set of building blocks elements of the model made of economic entities and offering transfers and describe a methodology that configures a business or organization network based on maximizing the consumption of the common value proposition.

The Case for the Business Process Engineer

Despite a decade of business process reengineering, we do not find a professional discipline of business process engineering today. We argue for the need for such a discipline by comparing a typical practice of designing a manufacturing process and a business process, and discuss why the need for a professional business process engineer is urgent