Seven Contexts for Service System Design
Keynote talk at IEEE SCC 2009
International Conference on Services Computing
September 21-25, 2009
Many of the most complex service systems being built and imagined today combine person-to-person encounters, technology-enhanced encounters, self-service, computational services, multi-channel, multi-device, and location-based or context-aware services. I examine the characteristic concerns and methods for these seven different design contexts to propose some unifying themes that span them, especially when the service-system is “information-intensive.”
Information-intensive services are those in which information processing or information exchange, rather than physical or interpersonal actions, account for the greatest proportion of the co-created value. From this more abstract perspective, a service encounter consists of a provider/producer, a client/customer/consumer/requestor/co-producer, and an interface that describes what the service does and how it is requested. This interface is usually implicit in person-to-person encounters, but is always explicit in the other contexts, where service inputs and outputs must be well-defined to enable technology infusion or automation.
This conceptualization of service system design makes it easier to see the systematic relationships among the contexts that can be exploited as design parameters or patterns, such as the substitutability of stored or contextual information for person-to-person interactions. It enables more top-down and robust design of service systems because decisions about functionality and responsibility can be made prior to and independently of decisions about implementation.
Robert J. Glushko is an adjunct full professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information, where he is one of the founding faculty members of the Information and Service Design program. He has a Ph.D. (Cognitive Psychology) from the University of California, San Diego and an MS (Software Engineering) from the Wang Institute. He has thirty years of R&D, consulting, and entrepreneurial experience in information systems and service design, content management, electronic publishing, Internet commerce, and human factors in computing systems. He founded or co-founded four companies, including Veo Systems in 1997, which pioneered the use of XML and web services for electronic business before its 1999 acquisition by Commerce One. Veo's innovations included the Common Business Library (CBL), the first native XML vocabulary for business-to-business transactions, and the Schema for Object-Oriented XML (SOX), the first object-oriented XML schema language.