Studying Service Systems

I was reading an article today by IBM Research about service systems. The authors define the study of service systems as "study of high value configurations of people (knowledge workers), technology, and organizations -- and how value is created and captured from reconfiguring networks of these three fundamental building blocks of economies and societies." People, technology, and organization (probably process) seem to be the three prong approach.

Being in service and support, it was inspiring to see them quote the future of services being bright -- "the future looks bright for the profession that studies and improves service systems,
coordinating people (knowledge workers), technology, and organizations to accelerate
value creation and capture." Any activity or set of activities that result in significant value being created is definately noteworthy. But the biggest dilemma is that a formal education for services has not been established, and this is forming the premise of IBM's initiative towards education for service innovation.

Three Dimensions of Design Thinking...

The other day I was searching the web about design, and I came across the Institute of Design at Stanford University. One of the treasures of information I found was the picture shown above, which illustrates how design innovation emerges in the presence of technology, business, and human values. While business defines the "viability" of a product, service, initiative, etc., technology defines the "feasibility," and human values focuses on topics like "usability, desirability." Supportability is definately a human value that helps influence both technology and business. And at the center of all these dimensions is "design innovation." When creating a product, defining a service, orchastrating a marketing campaign, or whatever one is set out to do, do these three dimensions form the basis of good design? Business defines the purpose, technology defines the means to attain the purpose, and human values embellishes the purpose -- does that serve as a recipe for good design? There is only one way to find out...let's give it a try. In the next few posts, I will run an example through this thought process.

Shall We Start With Semantics?

Semantics are important. Just to ensure the same language is spoken throughout this blog, establishing an understanding for the following terms is important (1) Business Intelligence or BI (2) Supportability and (3) Service.

The Wikipedia definition of BI is the one I like the best. To quote Wikipedia, BI is "is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, providing access to, and analyzing data for the purpose of helping enterprise users make better business decisions." Wikipedia goes through the liberty of going in more detail, so if you need more detail about BI, I recommend visiting the BI section of Wikipedia. The heart of the definition, and probably the reason why BI is so important, is to help "users make better business decisions." There is more we can talk about, but let's save that for later.

On to supportability -- so what does Wikipedia say about supportability? Interestingly enough, Wikipedia uses the term "serviceability" and "supportability" interchangebly. In computer science terms, supportability is "the ability of technical support personnel to debug or perform root cause analysis in pursuit of solving a problem with a product." I would even extend this definition to include that it's the ability of anyone interacting with the software system to troubleshoot and analyze a problem encountered while using the product. The bottom line: supportability is the ability for a product to be supported. There is much more we can add here, but to establish a baseline definition this should suffice for now.

On to service, or customer service. Again, I will refer to Wikipedia's definition of service: "Customer service is the provision of labour and other resources, for the purpose of increasing the value that buyers receive from their purchases and from the processes leading up to the purchase." Service is a value generating activity for the buyers besides the value generated from the usage of the product. The unique characteristic of services, as opposed to products, is the inclusion of a "human element" to the overall user experience with the product.

An important distinction to make is between service and technical support. Technical Support (TS) can be viewed as a sub-category of services, which actually deals with providing assistance to resolve specific problems with the product. There is a school of thought that says TS is a seperate entity, which is perfectly viable. However, for this blog I am including TS under the umbrella of services. The bigger umbrella of services also includes activities such as training, customization, implementation advice, and other support services. In which ever way one slices the definitions, the underlying characteristic about service (and technical support) is the human interaction involved. This interaction can improve the overall experience of the user or in some cases take away from a good experience altogether.

So while I will discuss each of these subjects individually within their own silos and frameworks, I will eventually integrate these topics with the goal of building a bigger framework. I will propose various strategies for building a "Center of Excellence for BI Service & Supportability." A tall order? Probably so, and even though it looks daunting right now, it's definately possible...

User Experience for Services

A long time ago I came across an article, which discussed the rise of services versus products. The image on the right, more or less, summerizes the essence of the article. In the top half, there is an illustration for how the U.S. economic output for products and services has evolved over the past 3 decades. The output of services is definately on the rise, while the output of products is actually on the decline. What is driving this dynamic? Does this trend exist across all kinds of services and products (consumer goods, technology, retail, etc) or with specific industries?

And on the bottom half, three different, yet equally related, disciplines are associated to each decade. In the 80's the predominant discipline was quality. After all it was in 1982 that Edward Deming, the known American statistician, published his well-known book "Out of Crisis" which addressed several management topics. And of those topics, Deming emphasized that quality and continuous improvement of product and services were required for companies seeking transformation in the marketplace.

Deming's work probably created a foundation for the a discipline that prevailed the 90's, which this image dipicts as re-engineering. It was Dr. Michael Hammer, a well-known management strategist, who professed the discipline of business process re-engineering or BPR. Hammer is quoted to say that "Serving the customer is not a mechanical act but one that provides an opportunity for fulfillment and meaning."

And interestingly enough, the emphasis on fulfillment and meaning has probably resulted in another discipline to come to the forefront of business, which has emerged already in the 2000's and is being proliferated across industries -- namely user experience. And a key contributor for this discipline is Dan Pink, a journalist who is the author of "A Whole New Mind" a book that encourages businesses to provide fulfillment and meaning to their customers.

So if one were to look at products and services, it is quite clear that products are sold once, while services are sold for a lifetime. And while these disciplines of quality, re-engineering, and user experience have been (and continue to be) applicable to products, they are equally applicable to the services that accompany them. This is especially important to consider when one re-engineers services. How can optimal user experience be attached to a companies's service strategy? What strategic activities should companies develop? What sort of skills sets should companies look for in teams that will innovate service?

These are topics I hope to explore in my blog entries. But it goes without saying that in light of the dynamics at play between the output of products and servcices one should keep in mind the evolution of the various disciplines that attach to these entities...

Beginnings...

Over the course of one's career, one can garner vast amounts of theoretical and experiential knowledge about specific domains or subjects. One's success and influence within those subjects can earn one unique renown, and can be referred to as an SME or Subject Matter Expert. In the professional arena, my primary task has been to access supportability characteristics (or features) of enterprise software products and define requirements to make these products supportable. More specifically, my focus is on Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Warehousing (DW) products.

The umbrella of software supportability is also vast having many branches like deployability, serviceability, maintainability, diagnos-ability, etc. The list can be rather long, but the point is that software supportability is becoming a focus for several enterprise software companies. To solve complex business problems, companies have invested millions of dollars architecting and building rather complex software products. Complexity can be mitigated by having several iterations of simplifying a product over the course of the product lifecycle. One can also build features, ancillary tools and other product offerings to assist in the management of products (e.g. building supportability solutions).

With that said, I have created this blog to share the various discoveries, thoughts, and theories, that I learn and develop during my journey across three key domains: BI, software supportability, and service innovation -- with the hope of being an SME in these subjects. Enjoy!