Properties of Services

As described above a service is realized by the Service System through the relationships of Service System Entities that interact to deliver the specific service via SLA. SLAs and policies specify the conditions under which Services System entities reconfigure access rights by mutually agreed value propositions. Current management frameworks typically only focus on single Service System entities interfaces. While SLAs are mapped to the respective customer requirements, policies are provider-specific means to express constraints and rules for their internal operations. These rules may be independent of any particular customer [Theilmann, 2009].

Service Level Agreement (SLA)

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a set of technical (functional) and non-technical (non-functional) parameters agreed between customers and service providers. SLA’s can and do contain administrative level (non-technical) parameters (business related) such as SLA duration, service availability for the SLA duration, consequences for variations, failure reporting, priorities, and provisions for modifications to the SLA. However, for service level management the service level (technical) parameters need to be defined, monitored and assessed; these parameters may include throughput, quality, availability, security, performance, reliability (MTBF, maximum downtime, time-to-repair), and resource dedication.

A SLA represents the negotiated service level requirements (SLR) of the customer and should establish valid and reliable service performance measures since it is usually the basis for effective service level management (SLM). The goal of SLM is to ensure that service providers meet and maintain the prescribed quality of service (QoS). However, care should be taken since in some domains, the term QoS refers only to resource reservation control mechanisms rather than the achieved service quality, e.g., IP networks. Some terms used to mean the achieved service quality include the quality of experience (QoE), user-perceived performance and degree of satisfaction of the user and are used more generally across service domains.

Non-Functional Properties’s fall into two basic categories: Business properties such cost and method of payment and Environmental properties such as time and location. Business and Environmental properties are classified as “context properties” by Youakim Badr [Badr et al., 2008]. QoS properties such as Availability, Resiliency, Security, Reliability, Scalability, Agreement Duration, Response times, repair times, Usability, etc.

Table 1. Service Systems Engineering: Service Evaluation Measures

Adapted from [TIEN 2003] pending authorization.

Service Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

Service Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are defined and agreed to in the SLA; the service KPI are decomposed into service process measures (SPM) and Technical Performance Measure (TPM) during the analysis stage of the SSE process. In the design process the KPIs and TPM are allocated to Service Systems entities and their components, the business processes and their components so as to ensure compliance with service SLAs. The allocated measures generate “derived requirements” for the system entities and their relationships, the service entities components and the data and information flows required in the Service Systems to monitor, measure, and assess end-to-end SLA; these allocations ensure that the appropriate performance indicators apply to each of the links in the service value chain.

TPM’s are typically categorized as number of defective parts in a Manufacturing Service, Data transmission Latency and Data Throughput in an end-to-end application service, IP Quality of Service expressed by latency, jitter delay, throughput; SPM: Service Provisioning time, end-to-end Response Times to a service request (a combination of data and objective feedback), and Quality of Experience (QoE verified by objective feedback). Together, the KPI (TPM+SPM) and perception measures make up the service level management function. A Quality Assurance Systems (QAS), Continuous Process Improvement processes and Process Quality Management and Improvement (PQMI) should be planned, designed, deployed and managed for the capability to continuously improve the Service System and to monitor compliance with SLAs [PQMI, CMMI, ISO 9001, TL 9000, etc.].

As discussed earlier QOS needs to correlate customer perceived quality (subjective measure) with objective SPM & TPM measures. There are several techniques available to help monitor, measure, and assess TPM’s, but most are a variation on the theme of culling information from TPM’s using for example, Perceptual Speech Quality Measure (PSQM) and Perceptual Evaluation of Video Quality (PEVQ) and enhancing or verifying this information with customer or end-user perception of service by extending Mean Opinion Score (MOS) techniques. TSE played an important role in finding methodologies for correlation between perception and objective measures for the services of the 20th Century; SSE should continue to encourage multidisciplinary participation to equally find MPTs to correlate perceived service quality with TPM and with SPM for the services of the 21st Century.

Qualitative Service Measurement

Subjective (qualitative) service quality is the customer’s perceived conformity of the service with the expected objective. Word-of-mouth, personal needs and past experiences create an expected service. This perception must be captured via surveys and interviews. The perceived service is then compared with the expected service by the customer which leads to the perceived service quality as a result. Care should be taken to understand that subjective measures appear to measure customer attitudes, and attitudes may be the result of several encounters with the service as well as numerous encounters with other similar services.

In summary, the SLA documents service level requirements and establishes reliable and valid service performance measures (technical parameters) and levels agreed to. These technical parameters and their objectives are then monitored and continuously compared against both objective and subjective data culled from multiple internal and external sources. The goal is not to report the level of service in a given period, but to develop and implement a dynamic system capable of predicting and driving service level improvement over time.

Types of Services

The second, third, and fourth decades of the 21st century will almost certainly see similar and probably accelerated technology development as seen in the prior three decades. We will also see mass collaboration become established mode of operation. We are already seeing the beginnings of mass collaboration in developments like value co-creation where loosely entangled actors or entities come together (usually over a network) to create value in unexampled ways but which meet mutual and broader market requirements. Further developments in the technology, use, and acceptance of Social Media will continue to fuel the acceleration of these developments.

The next decades will see the grounding of concepts such as crowdsourcing, coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article, open innovation, promoted by Henry Chesbrough, a professor and executive director at the Center for Open Innovation at Berkeley, and Wikinomics, consultant Don Tapscott’s concept of corporations using mass collaboration and open source innovation supported by Enterprise 2.0 tools.

Roberto Saracco argues that “Communications will be the invisible fabric connecting us and the world whenever and wherever we happen to be in a completely seamless way, connecting us so transparently, cheaply, and effortlessly that very seldom will we think about it.” The ubiquity and invisibility of these communications will greatly facilitate the creation and destruction of ad hoc collectives, i.e. groups of entities that share or are motivated by at least one common issue or interest, or work together on a specific project(s) to achieve a common objective. This enterprise may engender the concept of the hive mind (the collective intelligence of many), which will be an intelligent version of real-life super organisms such as ant or bee nests [Hölldobler and Wilson, 2009].

These models will most certainly give rise to issues of property rights and liabilities; access rights for both the provider and the customer can be owned outright, Contracted/Leased, shared access or privileged access [Spohrer 2011]. For now, we are on the cusp of a management revolution that is likely to be as profound and unsettling as the one that gave birth to the modern industrial age. Driven by the emergence of powerful new collaborative technologies, this transformation will radically reshape the nature of work, the boundaries of the enterprise, and the responsibilities of business leaders [McAfee, 2009]

The Service Industry

The service-providing industry in the US is divided into thirteen sectors [Chang, 2010]:

1. Professional and Business services 2. Healthcare and Social Assistance 3. State and Local Government 4. Leisure and Hospitality 5. Other Services 6. Educational Services 7. Retail Trade 8. Financial activities 9. Transportation and warehousing 10. Wholesale trade 11. Information 12. Federal government 13. Utilities

[Spohrer, 2011] goes beyond the service sectors to propose three types of Service Systems:

1. Systems that focus on flow of things: Transportation and Supply chain, Water and waste recycling, Food and Products, Energy and Electric Grid, Information/ICT & Cloud

2. Systems that focus in Human Activities and Development: Buildings and Construction, Retail and Hospitality/ Media and Entertainment, Banking & Finance/ Business Consulting, Healthcare & Family Life, Education & Work Life/Jobs and Entrepreneurship

3. Systems that focus on Governing: City, State, Nation

Categorizing types and sectors of services is an important beginning because it can lead to better understanding of the emerging rules and relationships in service value chains and to enhance the value co-creation capabilities of innovative service concepts to contribute and impact our quality of life.

References

Citations

Badr, Y., Abraham, A., Biennier, F., and Grosan, C. 2008. Enhancing Web Service Selection by User Preferences of Non-Functional Features. 4th International Conference on Next Generation Web Services Practices. ISBN: 978-0-7695-3455-8.

Chang 2010. Service Systems Management and Engineering, Creating Strategic Differentiation and Operational Excellence, Chang C.M., John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2010, ISBN 978-0-470-42332-5.

Hölldobler, B. and Wilson, E.O. 2009. The Super-organism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN: 9780393067040.

McAfee, A. 2009. Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges. Harvard Business School Press, ISBN-10: 1422125874; ISBN-13: 978-1422125878.

Theilmann, W. and Baresi, L. 2009, Multi-level SLAs for Harmonized Management in the Future Internet. Towards the Future Internet - A European Research Perspective. Tselentis et al. (Eds.). IOS Press. Doi:10.3233/978-1-60750-007-0-183.