Scope of Service Systems Engineering

Enterprises plan, develop and manage the enhancements of their infrastructure, product and services including marketing strategies, product and service offerings. These plans propose new products or service offerings based on foreseen or new unexplored customer needs with clearly differentiated value propositions. Service strategies are the internal business processes required to design, operate and deliver the service. The mission of Service Strategies is to develop the capacity to achieve and maintain a strategic advantage. [ITIL V3]

Taking the Systems Engineering approach to Service Systems is imperative for the service-oriented customer-centric, holistic view to select and combine Service System entities. This approach can then define, and discover relationships among Service Systems entities, to plan, design, adapt or self-adapt to co-create value. The Service Systems Engineering approach should identify linkages, relationships, constraints, challenges/problems, new technologies, interface agreements or process development requirements among service entities required for the planned service or for future services.

SSE mandates the participation not only from engineering, business, operations and customers but also of different domains that range from Management Science, Behavioral Science, Social Science, Systems Science, Network Science, Computer Science, Decision Informatics, etc.

Service System Domains

[Hipel et. al. 2007] have presented a Table for Service Science in terms of the Domains & Methods including not only Service Systems but also Infrastructure & Transportation Systems, Environmental & Energy Systems and Defense & Space Systems. The collaboration domains in Figure 1 below are a first approximation to the collaboration required from different disciplines for Service Systems Engineering paradigm.

Figure 1. Service Systems Engineering Domain Collaboration

Major challenges faced by Service Systems Engineering include the dynamic nature of Service Systems to evolve and adapt to constantly changing operations and/or business environments and the need to overcome silos of knowledge; service system entities interoperability through interface agreement must be at the forefront of the service systems engineering design process for the harmonization of Operations, Administration and Maintenance procedures of the individual service system entities [Pineda 2010].

In addition, Service systems require open collaboration among all its stakeholders but recent research on mental models of multidisciplinary team’s integration and collaboration into cohesive teams have proven to be a major challenge [Carpenter et al. 2010].

In the SSE approach the social, governance, business, service, operations, and management activities are linked together through the Service Lifecycle; Service Systems are by themselves a type of Systems Of Systems (SOS) where traditional systems engineering practices need to be extended to include services systems entities relationships (interface agreements among people, organizations, processes and technologies) through information flows, technical interoperability, governance and access rights within systems of systems.

Interoperability of Services

Interoperability among the different service systems entities becomes highly relevant in service systems engineering since the constituent entities are designed according to stakeholder needs; the entity is usually managed and operated independently to satisfy its own objectives independently of other system entities. The objectives of individual service systems entities may not necessarily converge with the overall objectives of the service system. Thus, the need to include in the definition, analysis and design of the service system governance frameworks to align political objectives, service strategies, business objectives, ICT objectives, technology objectives and end-to-end Operations Administration and Maintenance Procedures (OAMP) and OAMP allocation to individual entities.

The discussion in this section relates to a NEW Service System development; As presented earlier if there is already a Service System defined and deployed then it may be that the new request is an SBA in which case the process is more of adaptations needed to existing Service System to deploy the new application e.g., SBA. In these instances advances in Computer Engineering, Computer Science and Software development already permit the adaptation and creation of SBA in a runtime environment for the discovery, development and publishing of applications [S-Cube and Computer Oriented Architectures].

The Service Development Process (SDP) for new services is triggered by the market concept of the intended service including the stakeholder(s), service value chain(s), target market(s), target customer(s), proposed SLA, demand forecast, pricing strategy, customer access privileges, Service Strategy, etc. The SDP process then adapts the TSE as a Life Cycle Approach (Concept/Definition, Design/Development, Deployment/Transition, Operations, Lifecycle Management/Utilization/CSI, Support, and Retirement) as discussed in Part 3 and in the ISO/IEC 15288 Generic Life Cycle Stages [ISO/IEC 2008]. A more detailed list of the SSE Process activities is described in Section 3.5.

Service Lifecycle Stages

The SDP stages and notation are depicted in Figure 2 below; due to the complexity of service systems the documents generated are becoming more Model Based electronic than written binders depending on the tools used.

Figure 2. Service Design Process: Life Cycle Stages.

We have included all the Life Cycle stages for completeness, but very often during the concept analysis phase it may be determined that not all stages are needed. In these cases, a recommendation should be made about which stages are specifically required for the realization of the service in question.

Service Design Management

Another important role of Service System Engineering is the Management of the SDP. SSE utilizes Traditional Systems Engineering (TSE) practices, as described in Part 3, to manage the resource and assets allocation to perform the activities required to realize the service through the value chain both for the customer and the service provider. The main focus in the SRP management is to provide the planning, organizational structure, collaboration environment and program controls to ensure that stakeholders needs are met from an end-to-end customer perspective.

The SRP management process aligns business objectives and business operational plans with end-to-end service objectives including customer management plans, service management and operations plans, operations technical plans, and technical plans. The main SSE Management activities are: (See Chapter 8):

• SSE Planning

• SSE Assessment and Control

• SSE Decision Management

• SSE Risk Management

• SSE Configuration Management

• SSE Information Management

• SSE Engineering Measurement

SSE plays a critical role in describing the needs of the intended service in terms of the Service day to day operations including customer care centers requirements, interface among Service Systems entities such as: Manufacturing Plant, Smart Grid, Hospital, network infrastructure provider(s), content provider(s) and service provider(s), service based application provider(s), applications providers and the Customer Management Process for the service

Current Research in Computer Engineering and Software Systems Engineering is looking at the development of runtime platforms to allow real time or near real time customer service discovery and publishing [Spark 2009]. There is particular interest from the research community to include Human-Computer Interactions (HCI) and behavioral Science to address Current Social Networking Services (Facebook, Twitter, Linkdln, Myspace, etc.) used to share unverified information via audio, messaging, video, chats, etc.

This research is gaining relevance because of the thin line between the customer (consumer, enterprise) and content providers in regards to security, privacy, information authentication and possible misuse of the user generated content. Even as the research progresses, these networking services are examples of business models organizing communities of interest for innovation. “If we understand this networking, then we may be able to see through the business strategies and systems design laws that optimize connected value co-creation” [Hsu 2009].

References

Citations

Carpenter, S., Delugach, H., Etzkorn, L., Fortune, J., Utley, D, and Virani, S. 2010. The Effect of Shared Mental Models on Team Performance. Industrial Engineering Research Conference, Institute of Industrial Engineers. Cancun, Mexico. Accepted.

Hipel, K.W., Jamshidi, M.M., Tien, J.M., and White, C.C. 2007. The Future of Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Application Domains and research Methods. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics-Part C: Applications and Reviews 37 (5): 726-743.

Hsu, C. 2009. Service Science and Network Science. Service Science 1 (2): i-ii.

Pineda, R. 2010. Understanding Complex System of Systems Engineering. International Engineering Network Plenary. Metz, France.

Spark, D., 2009. Real-Time Search and Discovery of the Social Web. Spark Media Solutions Report. http://sparkmediasolutions.com/. accessed on June 3rd 2011.

Primary References

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