Scloss Dagstuhl, 25.07.10 – 30.07.10, Seminar 10301
Perspectives Workshop: Service Value Networks [more]
Bill Hefley (CMU – Pittsburgh, US), Christos Nikolaou (University of Crete – Heraklion, GR), Stefan Tai (Universität Karlsruhe, DE)
Motivation
Services are receiving increasing attention in both the service economics and service computing communities. This trend is due to two observations:
1. From an economics viewpoint, services today are contributing the majority of jobs, GDP, and productivity growth in Europe and in other countries worldwide. This includes all activities by service sector firms, services associated with physical goods production, as well as services of the public sector.
2. From an ICT viewpoint, the evolution of the Internet enables the provision of software-as-a-service on the Web, and is thus changing the way distributed computing systems are being architected. Software systems are designed as service-oriented computing architectures consisting of loosely-coupled software components and data resources that are accessible using standard Web technology.
The notion of “service” used in both communities is different; however, they are not independent but have a strong symbiotic impact on each other. From an economics viewpoint services are increasingly ICT-enabled. Therefore, new ways of business process management, organization, productivity, and value co-creation emerge for service providers and service consumers. From an ICT viewpoint, the engineering and use of computing services requires careful consideration of the business and economical context, including business transformation aspects, market mechanisms, and social, organizational, and regulatory policies.
Services enable companies to spread the planning, design, manufacturing, distribution, and delivery functions of their products and services. Complexity created by rapid technological advances and the complexity of product design and manufacture has pushed modularization of corporate functions in a wide range of industries (electronics, car manufacturing, aerospace, retail, etc.). Modularization allows standardization and markets for services providing those functions. Modularization is thus one of the leading causes for the predominance of the service sector in the world economy. Competitive markets evolve best of breed functions, which in turn encourage deconstruction of formerly vertically organized companies and industries into service systems, also referred as value networks, to capitalize on this advantage.
One of the key aspects distinguishing service systems from the traditional product-centric view is the importance of value co-creation, i.e. customers act as co-producers in the service provisioning process or as co-innovators in the evolution of services. The concept of service value networks captures this idea by modeling the business structures and inter-relationships and dependencies between service providers, consumers, and intermediaries (or enablers). They facilitate representation of flexible, dynamic supply and demand chains together with their social, technological, and economic context. Thus, service value networks are a promising conceptual framework to better understand and manage the operational, strategic, and technological challenges of business design and business alliance formation.
The goal of the seminar is to bring together service researchers and experts from the various relevant fields and discuss the different existing approaches to modeling service value networks, identify shortcomings and open challenges, and to suggest a research agenda that leads to a better understanding of the functioning of complex service systems.
In this context, the seminar should particularly focus on the influence of modern ICT on the innovation processes in service systems. This includes services provided via new communication channels (e.g. mobile devices), computing platforms and marketplaces that provide value-adding intermediary functionality, new service business models that take better advantage of ICT in general, and improved customer participation enabled by new forms of social software and Web 2.0 technology. Four topics are listed as those of particular interest: Economics, business and social aspects of service value networks: • Describing, analyzing and predicting the evolution of service value networks • Coordination and competition between service value networks (Service-oriented) ICT for service value networks: • Service-oriented computing for service value networks • Social and Web 2.0 technologies for service-oriented architectures and service communities
Classification
* Networks
* Complexity
* Optimization
* Software Engineering
Keywords
* Service Science
* Service Systems
* Value Networks
* Service-oriented Computing