Science of Service Systems

Background

Marital dissolution is ubiquitous in western societies. It poses major scientific and sociological problems both in theoretical and therapeutic terms. Scholars and therapists agree on the existence of a sort of second law of thermodynamics for sentimental relationships. Effort is required to sustain them. Love is not enough.
Methodology/Principal Findings

Building on a simple version of the second law we use optimal control theory as a novel approach to model sentimental dynamics. Our analysis is consistent with sociological data. We show that, when both partners have similar emotional attributes, there is an optimal effort policy yielding a durable happy union. This policy is prey to structural destabilization resulting from a combination of two factors: there is an effort gap because the optimal policy always entails discomfort and there is a tendency to lower effort to non-sustaining levels due to the instability of the dynamics.
Conclusions/Significance

These mathematical facts implied by the model unveil an underlying mechanism that may explain couple disruption in real scenarios. Within this framework the apparent paradox that a union consistently planned to last forever will probably break up is explained as a mechanistic consequence of the second law.

daviding says: Entropy may play not only in marriages, but also in service relationships.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) and the University of Central Florida's (UCF) Institute for Advanced Systems Engineering (IASE) today announced they are working together to prepare students for jobs in systems engineering, a profession that is critical to the creation of the smart cities, healthcare systems and advanced products and systems of the future.

To help create the systems engineering workforce that is needed to tackle society's most pressing technology development and integration challenges, IBM is investing more than $2 million in software, in-kind donations and consulting. Through this relationship, UCF students gain hands-on experience using IBM's most popular systems engineering software. In addition to its use in classroom activities, the IBM software gives students and faculty tools to compete for grants and participate in advanced research projects. IBM executives and technical staff provide input into the development of IASE curriculum and coursework, and support the university's efforts to create a learning environment that emulates the real world of systems engineering.

daviding says: The significance of the systems engineering program at the University of Central Florida (in Orlando) is noted not only by IBM, but by INCOSE (Samantha Brown, president) in this press release.

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Networked Life looks at how our world is connected -- socially, economically, strategically and technologically -- and why it matters.

The answers to the questions at the top of this page are related. They have been the subject of a fascinating intersection of disciplines including computer science, physics, psychology, sociology, mathematics, economics and finance. Researchers from these areas all strive to quantify and explain the growing complexity and connectivity of the world around us, and they have begun to develop a rich new science along the way.

Networked Life will explore recent scientific efforts to explain social, economic and technological structures -- and the way these structures interact -- on many different scales, from the behavior of individuals or small groups to that of complex networks such as the Internet and the global economy.

This course covers computer science topics and other material that is mathematical, but all material will be presented in a way that is accessible to an educated audience with or without a strong technical background. The course is open to all majors and all levels, and is taught accordingly. There will be ample opportunities for those of a quantitative bent to dig deeper into the topics we examine. The majority of the course is grounded in scientific and mathematical findings of the past two decades or less (often much less).

Spring 2010 is the seventh offering of Networked Life. You can get a detailed sense for the course by visiting the extensive course web pages from Spring 2009, Spring 2008, Spring 2007, Spring 2006, Spring 2005, and Spring 2004. This year the course will cover many of the same topics, updated in light of new research since the 2007 offering. As has become standard in the course, we plan to include communal experiments in distributed human decision-making on networks.

daviding says: A course on networks in the Arts and Sciences program at the University of Pennsylvania. The recency of references is striking.

Wayne Wymore is now well established as an important leader in systems engineering and a founder of a highly original "school of thought" in the area of systems design. His contribution to this area, which will be the subject of a special issue of this journal in the near future, is best exposed in a trilogy consisting of this book and its two predecessors [Wymore, 1967, 1976]. Wymore's approach to systems design is characterized by mathematical rigor, comprehensiveness, and broad applicability. This book is, in some sense; the most complete presentation of his approach, even though it is restricted (contrary to its predecessors) to discrete systems.
[....]

daviding says: At the 2010 INCOSE Workshop on Autonomous System Testing and Evaluation, Jack Ring cited a "Wymorian approach", which is based on "A mathematical theory of systems engineering: the elements"
by A. Wayne Wymore (see http://books.google.ca/books?id=yXrsAAAAIAAJ , unfortunately without a full preview). This may be at the foundations of the current interest in MBSE at INCOSE as a major initiative. The 1993 book is previewable at http://books.google.ca/books?id=CLgsYC3K2yAC .

In an age in which consumers, businesses and governments are increasingly focused on socially responsible actions, much of our planet's natural and financial resources are being squandered simply by conducting business as usual: Much of the world's food supply never makes it to consumers. A considerable portion of the water used each year is frivoled away by poor agricultural water management. And road congestion, poor routing and other traffic issues around the globe contribute to substantial crude oil waste.

Much - if not most - of this inefficiency can be attributed to the fact that we have optimized the way the world works within silos, with little regard for how the processes and systems that drive our planet interrelate. We've tuned these processes to generate specific outcomes for individual communities, nations, enterprises and value chains.

To root out inefficiencies and reclaim a substantial portion of that which is lost, businesses, industries, governments and cities will need to think in terms of systems, or more accurately, a system of systems. We'll also need to collaborate at unprecedented levels. Certainly, no single organization owns the world's food system, and no single entity can fix the world's healthcare system. Success will depend upon understanding the full set of cause-and-effect relationships that link systems and using this knowledge to create greater synergy.

The chief obstacle that remains is mindset - moving from short-sighted to long-term perspectives, from siloed to system-of-systems decision making. Download the IBM Institute for Business Value executive report, "The world's trillion-dollar challenge: Using a system-of-systems approach to build a smarter planet," to discover a framework for helping solve real-world problems using a system-of-systems approach.

daviding says: The use of the phrase "systems of systems" in a report from IBM Global Business Services (i.e. the management consulting arm) is interesting.

In a surprise verdict that stunned even the defendant, a justice of the peace has dismissed a slate of raw-milk-related charges against Ontario dairyman Michael Schmidt and simultaneously delivered a boon to Canada's food-rights movement.

Mr. Schmidt supplies raw milk to a small network of people with ownership shares in his dairy cattle. He was facing 19 charges related to public health and milk marketing when, looking grim, he took his seat before Justice of the Peace Paul Kowarsky in a Newmarket courtroom yesterday morning.

Throughout the three hours it took Mr. Kowarsky to read out his 40-page verdict, the outlook for Mr. Schmidt's cow-sharing operation flip-flopped from promising to doomed and back again. But Mr. Kowarsky ultimately acquitted the farmer, a rising star in the growing international farming and food-rights movement, on the basis that the unique structure of his operation does not violate Ontario's stringent milk-marketing laws. Nor does Mr. Schmidt's provision of unpasteurized milk (which is illegal to sell in Canada) to shareholders endanger public health, Mr. Kowarsky said.

The judgment, the culmination of a legal battle that was launched in 2006 after a raid by the Ministry of Natural Resources on Mr. Schmidt's farm in Durham, Ont., does not mean raw milk can be commercially sold in Ontario. The decision also remains open to appeal. However, it gives a boost to the burgeoning sector of creative farm-to-consumer food delivery-programs, including "cow-shares," which have grown in popularity as mistrust in the industrial food system has increased.

"What I did foremost was make sure that farmers have the rights to engage in private contracting with consumers who make an informed choice," said Mr. Schmidt, who called the ruling "brilliant" but admitted he "didn't expect such a clear verdict."

He has battled with public health officials and government milk regulators since the first crackdown on his raw-milk operation, in 1994. Unpasteurized pro

daviding says: The difference between selling milk and contracting for cow-share memberships can be seen as a shift from the presumptions of industrial production towards a service system. The regulators are trying to protect bulk distribution of raw milk from anonymous sellers to anonymous buyers. In Michael Schmidt's milk house, the cow-share owners not the provider of the product not only as the person who owns the farm, but also the original producer (i.e. the cow).

We introduce the concept of structural analysis of a business enterprise. The practice of enterprise structural analysis amounts to the construction of an enterprise model using business entities defined in an enterprise ontology or enterprise architecture and creating specific views of the enterprise based on relationships among the entities. As we demonstrate through a simple yet illustrative example of a hypothetical coffee shop business, these views can provide many insights and points of analysis. Structural analysis provides an interactive, analytical environment for a user to view an enterprise from multiple perspectives, an approach not unlike On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) but for analyzing the qualitative or structural aspects of the enterprise.

daviding says: This article describes business entities, and works concretely through an example with activities, resources and organization in a coffee shop.

The basic idea:

A method to select the appropriate management actions in a complex adaptive system based on the degree of certainty and level of agreement on the issue in question.

daviding says: I came to this 2001 page by Brenda Zimmerman, interpreting Ralph Stacey's work, via the presentation on the Constellation Model by Tonya Surman (at the Centre for Social Innovation, Toronto).

Inspired by complexity theory and open source thinking, the Constellation Model provides a framework to help organizations collaborate. The organizing model emphasizes the role of small, self-selecting action teams that operate interdependently, supported by a Stewardship Group. Leadership rotates fluidly among partners, where each partner has the freedom to lead a constellation that matches its profile and skills. The result is a shift from strained partnerships to open and effective collaborations.

This organizing model is a true social innovation. Initially created and refined with the Canadian Partnership for Children's Health and Environment, the Constellation Model has been replicated and adapted to support the work of a dozen groups. Join Tonya Surman, creator of the model, as she explains how the model works and takes on your collaboration challenge!

This is an ideal workshop for groups that are exploring what kind of a collaboration might work for their project or for learners exploring new models of organizing.

Suggested readings:
http://www.lcsi.smu.edu.sg/downloads/MarkSurmanFinalAug-2.pdf
http://www.osbr.ca/ojs/index.php/osbr/article/view/698/666

daviding says: I received a Facebook invitation for this upcoming talk by Tonya Surman, director of the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto. There's links to the same article (in two forms) at the bottom of the page. The foundations cite Ralph Stacey via Brenda Zimmerman.

There's a video profile of Tonya Surman from TV Ontario at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfA8-vOZV9s .

Conference on Systems Engineering Research

Stevens Institute of Technology and Delft University of Technology in collaboration with the University of Southern California (USC), presents the 8th Annual Conference on Systems Engineering Research (CSER)


Conference Objective

The objective of this conference is to provide practitioners and researchers in academia, industry, and government with a common platform to present, discuss and influence Systems Engineering research, and to enhance the practice of Systems Engineering and Systems Engineering education.
Call for Papers

We invite original research papers addressing any aspect of the Systems Engineering lifecycle. This includes conception, design and architecting, development, modeling and simulation, production, integration, validation, operation and support of these systems. Additional topics include definition of metrics, performance, and improvement methods, assessment and mitigation of risks, definition of critical success factors, and definition of best practices. All papers will be peer reviewed, and if accepted, presented at the conference.

daviding says: I have this conference marked on my calendar. The Nov. 1 paper deadline is tough for me. In addition, I should also be working on my dissertation in the spring ... and that's not on a systems engineering topic.

Customers introduce tremendous variability to that process, but they also complain about any lack of consistency and don't care about the company's profit agenda. Managing customer-introduced variability, the author argues, is a central challenge for service companies. The first step is to diagnose which type of variability is causing mischief: Customers may arrive at different times, request different kinds of service, possess different capabilities, make varying degrees of effort, and have different personal preferences. Should companies accommodate variability or reduce it? Accommodation often involves asking employees to compensate for the variations among customers--a potentially costly solution. Reduction often means offering a limited menu of options, which may drive customers away. Some companies have learned to deal with customer-introduced variability without damaging either their operating environments or customers' service experiences.

The key table ...
Y-axis:
(1) Arrival variability,
(2) Request variability,
(3) Capability variability,
(4) Effort variability,
(5) Subject Preference variability;
Y-axis:
(a) Classic accommodation,
(b) Low-Cost Accommodation,
(c) Classic Reduction,
(d) Uncompromised Reduction

The Royal Society has recently published the findings of a major study on the role of science in services sector innovation. Entitled Hidden Wealth: the contribution of science to service sector innovation , the report highlights the wider significance of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) to the services sector, which makes up around three quarters of the UK economy.

Hidden Wealth concludes that STEM is deeply embedded within the UK service sectors and has an extensive impact on service innovation processes, which is often hidden. Although STEM is important in services sector innovation now, it is also likely to play an important part in the future of services, as many services are on the cusp of a transition to more personalised and interconnected systems, which will require significant advances in STEM.

This report from the Royal Society was cited by Irving Wladawsky-Berger at http://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2009/08/hidden-wealth-science-technology-and-services-innovation-in-the-21st-century.html .

Excerpt:
6.6.6 A systems-based approach to understanding services.

One solution may lie in the wider adoption of systems-based approaches to understanding services. A more systematic approach to studying services should result in better design, management and understanding of services and, at the same time, provide a suitable context in which to integrate disciplines such as social sciences, management science, economics and STEM. These sorts of educational programmes may particularly benefit firms who do not require graduates with deep knowledge in one of the existing disciplines. [p. 61]

However, we note that when this has been attempted in the past, as with systems science and complexity theory -- both of which have existed for several decades and have been widely applied in scientific, engineering and social science contexts -- the tendency has been for people to organise themselves into disciplinary silos, with the result that the desired new interdisciplinary approaches have struggled to impose themselves. [pp. 61-62]

The emerging Service Science, Manufacturing and Engineering (SSME) or 'Service Science' concept is also intended to join up a broad range of disciplines, but is specifically concerned with ensuring that graduates are better equipped for the workplace. Service Science may ultimately help the development of multi-disciplinary capabilities but in this regard SSME programmes seem to have been slow to emerge and only partially successful to date.

A more profitable approach to redesigning academic curricula and delivery (at least as far as services are concerned) may be to focus in on service design, which seeks to understand the delivery of services from a user perspective and to develop better solutions (see Box 4.3 on page 40). Developments such as the Masters course in Service Design, Management and Innovation offered by the University of Manchester Centre for Service Research might provide good models for new courses, and should be closely mon

Many services can be self-provided. An individual user or a user firm can, for example, choose to do its own accounting - choose to self-provide that service - instead of hiring an accounting firm to provide it. Since users can 'serve themselves' in many cases, it is also possible for users to innovate with respect to the services they self-provide. In this paper, we explore the histories of 47 functionally novel and important commercial and retail banking services. We find that, in 85% of these cases, users self-provided the service before any bank offered it. Our empirical findings differ significantly from prevalent producer-centered views of service development. We speculate that the patterns we have observed in the banking industry will be found to be quite general. If so, this will be an important matter: perhaps 75% of GDP in advanced economies today is derived from services. We discuss the implications of our findings for research and practice in service development.

daviding says: Includes the idea of self-service, focusing on banking services.

The research presented in this volume, developed in the EC-funded Project ISCOM (Information Society as a Complex System), takes off from two fundamental premises: -- to guide innovation policies, taking account of the social, economic and geographic dimensions of innovation processes are at least as critical as the science and technology; and -- complex systems science is essential for understanding these dimensions.


Online version (possibly available at http://www.springerlink.com/content/978-1-4020-9662-4


-- Table of contents --


18 Chapters
Front Matter
I-IX

Part 1
Introduction
David Lane, Robert Maxfield, Dwight Read and Sander van der Leeuw
1-7

Part I From Biology to Society
Front Matter
9-9

From Population to Organization Thinking
David Lane, Robert Maxfield, Dwight Read and Sander van der Leeuw
11-42

The Innovation Innovation
Dwight Read, David Lane and Sander van der Leeuw
43-84

The Long-Term Evolution of Social Organization
Sander van der Leeuw, David Lane and Dwight Read
85-116

Biological Metaphors in Economics: Natural Selection and Competition
Andrea Ginzburg
117-152

Innovation in the Context of Networks, Hierarchies, and Cohesion
Douglas R. White
153-194

Part II
Innovation and Urban Systems
Front Matter
195-195

The Organization of Urban Systems
Anne Bretagnolle, Denise Pumain and Cline Vacchiani-Marcuzzo
197-220

The Self Similarity of Human Social Organization and Dynamics in Cities
Luis M.A. Bettencourt, Jose Lobo and Geoffrey B. West
221-236

Innovation Cycles and Urban Dynamics
Denise Pumain, Fabien Paulus and Cline Vacchiani-Marcuzzo
237-260

Part III
Innovation and Market Systems

Front Matter
261-261

Building a New Market System: Effective Action, Redirection and Generative Relationships
David Lane and Robert Maxfield
263-288

Incorporating a New Technology into Agent-Artifact Space: The Case of Control Syst

daviding says: I was thinking about (output) coproduction and (value) cocreation, and came across these proceedings, which includes a short article by Rafael Ramirez and Ulf Mannervick on "Designing value-creating systems".

Essay Archive

Edited by Lucy Kimbell and Victor P. Seidel, collected in this innovative and highly illustrated volume are findings from the designing for services project. Particular focus is on the practices of an emerging discipline of service design grounded in the arts and humanities. Three case studies in which service design companies worked with science and technology-based enterprises are discussed, from a range of academic perspectives.

daviding says: Wisdom and knowledge are sticky to experts. However, the advent of "open content" on academic materials challenges the traditional way in which universities interact with students.

"The Internet disrupts any industry whose core product can be reduced to ones and zeros," says Jose Ferreira, founder and CEO of education startup Knewton. Education, he says, "is the biggest virgin forest out there." Ferreira is among a loose-knit band of education 2.0 architects sharpening their saws for that forest. Their first foray was at MIT in 2001, when the school agreed to put coursework online for free. Today, you can find the full syllabi, lecture notes, class exercises, tests, and some video and audio for every course MIT offers, from physics to art history. This trove has been accessed by 56 million current and prospective students, alumni, professors, and armchair enthusiasts around the world. "The advent of the Web brings the ability to disseminate high-quality materials at almost no cost, leveling the playing field," says Cathy Casserly, a senior partner at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, who in her former role at the Hewlett Foundation provided seed funding for MIT's project. "We're changing the culture of how we think about knowledge and how it should be shared and who are the owners of knowledge."

But higher education remains, on the whole, a string quartet. MIT's courseware may be free, yet an MIT degree still costs upward of $189,000. College tuition has gone up more than any other good or service since 1990, and our nation's students and graduates hold a staggering $714 billion in outstanding student-loan debt. Once the world's most educated country, the United States today ranks 10th globally in the percentage of young people with postsecondary degrees. "Colleges have become outrageously expensive, yet there remains a general refusal to acknowledge the implications of new technologies," says Jim Groom, an "instructional technologist" at Virginia's University of Mary Washington and a prominent voice in the blogosphere for blowing up college as we know it. Groom, a chain-smoker with an ever-present five days' growth of

daviding says: Although the title says "price", informal ties reduce the cost of client interactions because the effort to transfer information on complex issues is lower.

... they modeled three features: how firms' prices changed with respect to the number of embedded ties they had with clients; the number of the firm's attorneys who sat on the boards of other corporations; and the status of the firm as perceived by peers.

The greater the proportion of informal relationships and unwritten arrangements a firm enjoyed with clients, the lower the fee the firm typically charged for complex legal work. Such ties promote clearer understanding of client needs and preferences and lessen the need for rigid oversight structures, allowing for more efficient and timely operation, thus requiring less billable time from a firm. Said one partner: "It's no question that trust enters into [pricing]. I mean, it's very rare that you're going to get the big $500 million transactions-I don't see them with a stranger." Said another: "A relationship allows [the client] to be more nimble with our firm; rather than having a formal engagement in a project, she may call a partner she knows directly-so it's very efficient for her."

Besides promoting the flow of private, valuable information between firm and client, network ties can give the firm access to useful information flowing between other parties. In particular, a firm can benefit significantly if its attorneys sit on corporate boards. One attorney described two notable advantages of board membership this way: "You have the benefit of seeing what other law firms are charging if the company that you sit on is using other firms. . . . And you get the benefit of the commentary that your fellow board people have on legal services and what they consider to be important." As a result of this privileged information, firms whose partners sit on corporate boards are able to charge higher rates for both routine and complex legal work.

Law firms perceived to have high social status are able to offer image-enhancing benefits to its clients, since the clients will appear knowledgeable

daviding says: The article recognizes the limitation of government statistics on services. The industry segment isn't exactly the focus of researchers interested in the creative class economy, but it does demonstrate how surrogate measures may be collected.

The Sapporo findings, published in a dry report on changing shopping trends and urban land use this week, show the number of brothels in the Susukino district, one of the three largest red-light areas in the country, has soared more than fourfold to 264 in the past two decades. [....]

This makes the sex trade a rare success story in an economy devastated by the steep decline in global demand for Japanese autos and electronics, drivers of the country's exports, and eroding domestic consumption, which supports a vast service sector.

Services account for the overwhelming part of economic activity in Japan and other modern countries, and they are notoriously difficult to measure precisely.

In Canada, Statistics Canada frequently examines and overhauls the way it measures services in the search for greater accuracy. But Statscan would have a hard time gauging the true economic impact of the sex trade.

It's much easier to measure in Japan, where several sexual acts are allowed in licensed outlets in designated areas, although actual intercourse in those establishments is outlawed.

daviding says: Here's an interesting tidbit on how the social media could be changing the way musical performances are being done. Major concert tours (since the Beatles played Shea Stadium) have taken an industrial approach of mounting the production, and then playing the same thing over and over again. Most jazz players have the facility to drop into different combos, and changing the lineup at each performance makes that date unique. Having a wide variety of performances show up on the Internet drives additional interest, as opposed to hearing exactly the same performance every time. (Antonio Sanchez is a well-respected drummer, who doesn't just play with Pat Metheny).

"I would be committed to one band (usually guitarist Pat Metheny's) most of the time, out of musical preference, or whoever had more work. Now I have to play with four or five different bands in order to keep busy. Before, people toured longer, because the market was different. Now, even big names like Chick Corea, or Pat, or Herbie Hancock, every time they go out, they go out with a different band, because promoters want a different project every single time. Because of YouTube and the Internet, people see so much stuff that when they want to see something live, they want something special."

daviding says: If software engineering is engineering, then we should also think about service engineering as engineering. This article also helps to draw some lines between engineering as applied science, and more theoretical forms of science, both in the domain of services systems and human systems.

Gerald Weinberg once wrote, "If software engineering truly is engineering, then it ought to be able to learn from the evolution of other engineering disciplines." Robert Glass and his colleagues provocatively evaluated how often software engineering literature does this.4 They concluded that the literature relies heavily on software anecdotes and draws very lightly from other engineering fields. Walter Tichy found that fewer than 50% of the published software engineering papers tested their hypotheses, compared to 90% in most other fields.

So software engineering may suffer from our habit of paying too little attention to how other engineers do engineering. In a recent extensive study of practices engineers expect explicitly or tacitly, Riehle found six we do not do well.

Predictable outcomes (principle of least surprise). [....]
Design metrics, including design to tolerances. [....]
Failure tolerance. [....]
Separation of design from implementation. [....]
Reconciliation of conflicting forces and constraints. [....]
Adapting to changing environments. [....]