Towards a Theory of Emergent Service Value Networks and an Application in an e-learning Service Economy

Transcription

1 Towards a Theory of Emergent Service Value Networks and an Application in an e-learning Service Economy Christos Nikolaou, Marina Bitsaki CS Department University of Crete Greece 1

2 The Emergence of Service Economy (Percent employment in service jobs) USA Canada Japan France Italy China (United Nations, 1999, p.??) 2

3 The open problems in the service economies ICT and the Internet have enabled the emergence of new services, and of new forms of traditional services adapted to the new media and communication channels. Large companies and public bodies have often re-engineered their processes and redefined their organization as a network of interdependent services, sometimes outsourcing some of them. Given that a large part of value is produced by networks of services, understanding how services can be defined, setup, composed one with the others, and made visible to other services and to end customers and users, becomes a high social priority. Methods are needed to define new service chains to effectively support business processes. Modern organizations want to understand how such systems can be effectively designed, monitored through relevant performance indicators, and how their evolution can be handled. 3

4 The Challenge The challenge is the creation of computational theories and models that help us understand: how services associating humans and information and communication technologies emerge, how they are helping the emergence, creation, or optimization of organizational structures, how these structures interact, evolve and adapt in order to better meet the needs and aspirations of people, business and wider society. notice and exploit the duality of concepts and resulting models and theories: On the one hand, organizations are formed by smaller units that provide services to each other, so that the organization as a whole can be thought of as a composition of the services provided by its individual components, itself providing services to the outside world. And on the other hand, any service can be thought of as human-computer, computer-computer or computer-human interface, provided by organizations. Developing theories about how organizations are formed evolve and interact, inevitably leads us to developing theories about how services are formed, evolve and are being composed. 4

5 Business Ecosystems Business ecosystems are economic communities of interacting enterprises and individuals that produce goods and services, attaching value to their members. The way such systems are created, transformed, expanded, shrunk or get extinct is tightly affected by the structure of markets in which goods and services are exchanged: auction markets are simpler structures where buyers and sellers, after momentarily exchanging goods and services, leave the market place. On the other hand, emergent Integrated Business Service Networks (IBSNs) are more permanent market structures where longer term contracts can be negotiated, longer term Service Level Agreements (SLAs) adhered to, and where trust relationships emerge. These network structures are stable as long as value is created to all partners involved, and moreover, no bigger value is created for any of the partners of the value net, if they re-arranged themselves in other networks, possibly competing with each other. 5

6 the Dynamics of Emergent Service Value Networks Capturing the dynamics of the ecosystem structures (emerging markets and business models, networks, consumers, regulators, etc.) is part of the bigger challenge. We are especially interested in analyzing and predicting how existing market interactions can give rise to emergent IBSNs, with possibly business sector specific patterns: develop models of value creation and destruction in networks and of value optimization. show how the drive for value optimization and the constant change of the environment (new businesses enter the ecosystem and others die, innovative services and products appear, etc.) push the network to waves of restructuring in order to remain competitive. develop criteria and indicators of change that can serve as input for business process and alliances redesign and realignment. 6

7 From KPIs and SLAs to Business Processes and Workflows Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are extensively used to gauge business units performance and to guide top management decisions about business strategy, such as new product and services introduction, pricing, etc. SLAs govern business interactions, and especially in long term business relationships such as the ones existing in (ISBNs). KPIs and SLAs are closely related to the value expected or created by pursuing specific business strategies (to achieve KPI targets) or by establishing business relationships and generating revenue (governed by SLAs). In addition, both KPIs and SLAs have to comply to the current regulatory standards. Finally, business process design and implementation can directly affect parameters such as timing, quality assurance and control, customer satisfaction, etc., to name just a few, which in turn can have a direct impact on both KPIs and SLA enforcement. Although the qualitative relationships between KPIs, SLAs, value nets and their underlying business processes are known for quite some time now, there is a lack, to a significant degree, of models and analytical tools that would reflect these relationships accurately. 7

8 Research on Service Economies Initial work on these models has already started and has been reported at [Caswell 2006]. The research work proposed above would be in line with the FET Proactive call on the Science of Complex Systems for socially intelligent ICT and it would address the topics of theoretical and algorithmic foundations and of prediction and predictability of the emerging service economies. 8

9 An emergent e-learning service society application domain. The advantages of using this application domain are: that as academics and researchers we are to various degrees involved in creating and delivering educational material; that there are international standards such as SCORM about how this material should be organized in e-learning objects; that, there are research efforts underway around the world, to transform collections of learning objects to web service systems; that there are already in place user mechanisms for evaluating the effectiveness of such learning objects; and that therefore one could imagine the appearance of emergent properties of such collections where "popular" learning objects combine without human guidance (or with some human guidelines) to form "better" educational collections. Software brokers could be developed that could facilitate this emergent service composition. One can also explore other interactions between humans and learning objects, such as adapting to the learner s level, checking the learner s knowledge etc. Field studies in student campuses (or for employees of corporations). Existing learning management systems, such as the open source Moodle, or other SCORM compatible proprietary ones could be used to interface learning objects to humans. 9