Group items tagged

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: This article published in the Rotman Magazine on "Wicked Problems" is available on the Ideo web site. Designing a system for scale is a practical and interesting challenge.

Growing Influential Networks Following are three approaches that specifically deal with the idea of humanizing big problems to influence people to change and grow influential networks. 1. Human-Centered Systems: Design for People, Not the System 2. Sticky Systems: Design for Scale 3. Reciprocal Systems: Connect by Sharing The Five Principles of Systems at Scale 1. Ask how the system feels, not just how it works. 2. Recognize that a good system is often the best influencer. 3. Let the user close the loop. 4. Go micro with the human factors. 5. Start with hope, and take the long view.

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. [....]

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 .

Print ISBN: 9780470382417 Online ISBN: 9780470569627 DOI: 10.1002/9780470569627 Industrial Engineering What you need to know to engineer the global service economy. As customers and service providers create new value through globally interconnected service enterprises, service engineers are finding new opportunities to innovate, design, and manage the service operations and processes of the new service-based economy. Introduction to Service Engineering provides the tools and information a service engineer needs to fulfill this critical new role. The book introduces engineers as well as students to the fundamentals of the theory and practice of service engineering, covering the characteristics of service enterprises, service design and operations, customer service and service quality, web-based services, and innovations in service systems.

At one time, the belief was that services-ranging from healthcare to retail, from banking to education-were the exclusive domain of local providers and were therefore impervious to foreign competition. Because they required direct interaction with customers, service providers needed to be located where their customers were (Bryson et al. 2004). This belief-along with many others associated with service activities requiring direct customer interactions-is no longer true because information technology has fundamentally changed the way many services are now designed and delivered (Karmarkar 2004). In this editorial, we introduce a framework for service managers that shows how advances in technology are continuing to change the way service providers and their customers interact; how both providers and customers access resources and unlock their capabilities in the co-creation of value. We also identify some major challenges confronting today's service managers who are competing in a rapidly changing global knowledge economy. Their success in addressing these challenges requires increasingly sophisticated management techniques that continue to focus on creating value for both direct and indirect customer-provider interactions.

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

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: This is an interesting example of decomplexification (in the vocabulary of Tim Allen). Instead of integrating health services into a centralized facilities (i.e. complexifying), having doctors distributed nearer to the homes of patients can reduce costs. The difference between the era of Marcus Welby MD and today is that the Internet enables easy electronic sharing of patient records ... if the physicians and patients are willing to allow that free flow of information.

The primary-care doctor is gaining new respect in Washington. Battles may be breaking out left and right over the various health-care bills emerging from Congress, but reformers on both sides agree that general practitioners should be given a central role in uniting the fragmented U.S. medical system. This vision has a name: the "patient-centered medical home." The "home" is the office of a primary-care doctor where patients would go for most of their medical needs. The general practitioner would oversee everything from flu shots to chronic disease management to weight loss, and coordinate care with nurses, pharmacists, and specialists. A 2004 study estimated that if every patient had such a home, the resulting efficiencies might reduce U.S. health-care costs by 5.6%, a savings of $67 billion a year. [...] advocates say the new concept is designed to help patients, not insurers. It's more like doctoring 1950s-style, when a Marcus Welby figure handled all the family's medical needs. This time it's juiced up with digital technology. It also represents a politically painless way to streamline a disorganized and wasteful system that chews up a crippling 18% of the U.S. gross domestic product. That burden is felt particularly by private industry, which covers 60% of the nation's insured. Since most businesses try to ferret out waste and disorganization in their own operations, the medical home is a concept they can embrace in good conscience. One of the biggest advocates is IBM (IBM), which shelled out $1.3 billion last year on health benefits for its U.S. employees and retirees, equal to one month of the company's net income. Dr. Paul H. Grundy, 57, who holds the unusual title of director of health-care transformation for IBM, is a medical-home evangelist who led the company to start the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative, a coalition of some 500 large employers, insurers, consumer groups, and doctors. Part of his goal, he says, is to show that "emp

daviding says: This is the first version of a quantitative study that could become an annual study. Note the 25 metrics in nine categories over three sets of main indicators (foundations, flows of resources, impacts).

... today we're publishing as The 2009 Shift Index, a new set of economic indicators built for the digital world. Because it focuses on longer-term, "secular" changes to the business environment, the Shift Index is designed as a complement to the overwhelmingly short-term, cyclical measures that comprise most of today's economic indices. The full report and findings are available here. And a summary version of the framework, index, and findings is now out in the July/August Harvard Business Review. In the months and years to come, this inaugural index, which focuses exclusively on the U.S. economy, will be regularly updated to track changes over time and expand the ability to compare performance trends across industries, countries, and firms. The Shift Index tracks 25 metrics in nine categories across three sets of main indicators: Foundations, which set the stage for major change; Flows of resources, such as knowledge, which allow businesses to enhance productivity; and Impacts, which help gauge progress at an economy-wide level. Together these indicators represent phases of transformation in the Big Shift taking place in the global business environment. What do the findings show? The 2009 Shift Index reveals a disquieting performance paradox in the US corporate sector. On the one hand, labor productivity has nearly doubled since 1965. During those same years, however, US companies' Return on Assets (ROA) progressively dropped 75 percent from their 1965 level.

The original pointer to this report summary is from Jim Spohrer at http://forums.thesrii.org/srii/blog/article?blog.id=main_blog&message.id=191#M191 .

Key messages * There are three primary stakeholder groups that can guide the development of services science: academia, government and industry. Only by investing and working together in a coordinated manner can the maximum promise of services science be realised. * The global recession should sharpen government and industry's focus on services science as they seek solutions to invigorate the western economy, to make business more competitive and to learn from this latest setback. * Services science has the potential to establish a new industry of professionals (compare engineers, lawyers and computer scientists) whose expertise can be drawn upon to benefit the broader services-led economy. * The degree of human intervention required during the lifetime of an IT services contract is too high and is consequently both too expensive to be efficient and too error-prone to be effective. These shortcomings are directly related to the absence of scientific rigour in the design and delivery of these services. * IT is integral to services science, since modern service systems often have IT enablement heavily involved in service delivery. * IT service providers have the potential to benefit from services science by making their offerings more meaningful and resilient in a market that will increasingly demand more efficient service delivery. * Innovation in services delivery is at the heart of the vision for services science. The end goal should be a virtuous circle of innovation that can encourage new business opportunities and, in turn, create further innovation in the delivery of services. * Collaboration, investment and sharing of knowledge are vital to progressing services science research and development. * Significant challenges still need to be overcome to drive adoption of services science, not least of which is the complexity of aligning academic, business and governmental interests at a given moment in time. * Gove

OMG™ and the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) today announced that they have agreed to work together on the development of OMG's new program to certify Systems Engineers and other practitioners on the OMG Systems Modeling Language (OMG SysML™) standard. SysML is a graphical modeling language used to perform Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) - that is, to specify and design complex systems that may include hardware, information, personnel, and facilities in addition to software. The program, to be called OCSMP™ (OMG-Certified Systems Modeling Professional), will be OMG's fourth certification. OMG, an international, open membership, not-for-profit industry consortium, maintains standards for interoperability, modeling, and process maturity including the Model Driven Architecture® (MDA®) and Unified Modeling Language™ (UML®); in addition, OMG certifies practitioners in many of these standards. INCOSE is a not-for-profit membership organization dedicated to advancing the state of the art and practice of systems engineering, in part through its Certified Systems Engineering Professional (CSEP) certification program.

The hard (in the sense of difficult) part of service science is the social system side. INCOSE and OMG don't really address that. They address the hard (as opposed to soft) systems aspects, with people merely as more parts of an intrinsically engineered system (weapons system, transportation system, etc.). I applaud your diligence with respect to SysML and all that, but I hope your vision of the science of service systems is big enough to include the social side as well.

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.