Science of Service Systems

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. [....]

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: Categorizing problems as P-type, N-type and NP-type (i.e. NP-hard) provides a way for appreciating why managers avoid taking on some challenges. It's better to succeed on an easy problem, than fail on a hard one. (There's a easier-reading version of this article in Rotman Magazine Winter 2009 that seems to have been evolved for publication into Harvard Business Review in January 2009).

[from the introduction] We develop a model of cognitive choices managers implicitly make among and within problem complexity classes and argue that strategic managers use problem statements from one complexity class with greater regularity than those from other complexity classes to make sense of their predicaments (i.e. to transform 'situations' or 'raw feels' into 'problems' or 'puzzles'). We examine the marginal value to strategic managers of greater 'logical complexity' - parametrized by the marginal value of greater precision of an answer and the computational sophistication of competitors schema - to come up with a computationally precise formulation of 'ecological rationality'.

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: The web page has a link to a PDF, in which the footnote reads: "This paper is Chapter 1 of Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems, by Jeff Conklin, Ph.D., Wiley, October 2005." If the challenge of a wicked problem wasn't enough, communicating a potential solution each new person coming to the problem creates its own issues. Dialogue mapping could provide some assistance in at least reducing the learning curve of the new participant on options, alternatives, paths and considerations already covered.

For a more detailed discussion of wicked problems, see Wicked Problems and Social Complexity, CogNexus Institute's most downloaded white paper. Problem wickedness demands tools and methods which create shared understanding and shared commitment. Following Horst Rittel's analysis, we have developed "Dialogue Mapping", based on Rittel's Issue Based Information System (IBIS), which provides an elegant way of dealing with the fragmentation around a wicked problem. Because the group or team's understanding of the wicked problem is evolving, productive movement toward a solution requires powerful mechanisms for getting everyone on the same page. There will be volumes facts, data, studies and reports about a wicked problem, but the shared commitment needed to create durable solution will not live in information or knowledge. Understanding a wicked problem is about collectively making sense of the situation and coming to shared understanding about who wants what. Dialogue Mapping is such a method, because it is an approach which is rooted in maximizing communication and coherence among diverse stakeholders. Dialogue Mapping -- the process of crafting IBIS maps interactively with a group -- is not a process in the traditional sense: it is a structural augmentation of group communication. It provides a group with an enriched Dialogue environment which both de-emphasizes personal dynamics (e.g. right/wrong or win/loose dynamics) and creates a coherent shared space for crafting and negotiating shared understanding.

daviding says: If the foundation of the system is in entropy rather than equilibrium, we'll need to figure out how exchange-based societies work, and the function of money (as information, in a general theory of systems).

The specific purpose of this paper is to trace the development of entropy-related thought from its thermodynamic origins through its organizational and economic applications to its relationship to money information. That trace reveals that existing entropy measures are of states or changes in states that are caused by energy processes. We propose that entropy may as well be conceived as entropic process. The social emergent specific exchange value provides a metric by which entropic process may be quantified. The analysis connects the traditional state-oriented entropy measures to measures of entropic process in social systems. In doing so, the character of exchange-based societies and the function of money information within them are elaborated.

daviding says: This is the first of three articles in the June 2007 issue of SPAR. As an alternative to coming from a western perspective -- not to say that there aren't differences from the Anglo-American approach in Europe! -- these three chapters would provide significant fodder for discussion on core concepts in systems theory.

This paper compares some key concepts from Buddhism with ideas from different traditions of systems thinking. There appear to be many similarities, suggesting that there is significant potential for dialogue and mutual learning. The similarities also indicate that it may be possible to develop a Buddhist systems methodology to help guide exploration and change within Buddhist organisations.

daviding says: I was struck by a quotation by Khistry in the first pargraph of this article. In fact, Churchman (1968) reveals toward the end of one of his most popular books: "Indeed, if I were to think of one theme that has been in the back of my mind as I wrote these chapters, it is the shame of deception" (p. 228). Churchman concludes: "The ultimate meaning of the systems approach, therefore, lies in the creation of a theory of deception and a fuller understanding of the ways in which the human being can be deceived about his world and in an interaction between these different viewpoints" (pp. 229-230).

This paper critically examines some important topics of systemic thinking to understand how our perception of problems can be enhanced and how the chances of deception can be mitigated while dealing with real-world problems. To achieve this objective, an attempt is first made to scrutinize some of the key issues of systemic thinking by looking through the lens of Churchman's aphorisms at: (1) the illusion of completeness and closure, (2) the meaning of holism, and (3) the concept of `Interbeing'. A preliminary `agenda for action' is then laid out suggesting ways for increasing our perception and for minimizing the chances of being deceived in dealing with systems problems in practice.

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.

daviding says: There's a philosophical shift to move from information held in private within government departments to free-flowing content.

Web 2.0 technologies are now being deployed in government settings. For example, public agencies have used blogs to communicate information on public hearings, wikis and RSS feeds to coordinate work, and wikis to internally share expertise, and intelligence information. The potential for Web 2.0 tools create a public sector paradox. On the one hand, they have the potential to create real transformative opportunities related to key public sector issues of transparency, accountability, communication and collaboration, and to promote deeper levels of civic engagement. On the other hand, information flow within government, across government agencies and between government and the public is often highly restricted through regulations, specific reporting structures and therefore usually delayed through the filter of the bureaucratic constraints. What the emergent application and popularity of Web 2.0 tools show is that there is an apparent need within government to create, distribute and collect information outside the given hierarchical information flow. Clearly, these most recent Internet technologies are creating dramatic changes in the way people at a peer-to-peer production level communicate and collaborate over the Internet. And these have potentially transformative implications for the way public sector organizations do work and communicate with each other and with citizens. But they also create potential difficulties and challenges that have their roots in the institutional contexts these technologies are or will be deployed within. In other words, it is not the technology that hinders us from transformation and innovation - it is the organizational and institutional hurdles that need to be overcome. This paper provides an overview of the transformative organizational, technological and informational challenges ahead.

daviding says: "A manifesto" isn't what I would usually expect from an academic institution.

The need for a fresh approach to U.S. communities is more urgent than ever because of the biggest global economic crisis since the Great Depression. Through examination of the barriers to solving urban problems (and the ways they reinforce each other), this paper offers a new approach to community transformation which calls for leaders to use technology to inform and connect people. We need to convert the social safety net into a social safety network through the creation of smarter communities that are information-rich, interconnected, and able to provide opportunities to all citizens. This process has already begun through such programs as Harlem Children's Zone, Baltimore's CitiStat, Elevate Miami, and others. And they can be replicated. But technology alone is not the answer. Realization of the vision requires leaders to invest in the tools, guide their use, and pave the way for transformation. Perhaps the urgency of the current economic crisis can provide the impetus to overcome resistance to change and turn problems into an opportunity to reduce costs, improve services to communities, and make our cities smarter.

... mainstream economic theory does not help addressing innovation policies suited to the knowledge economy as it assumes away the complexities of innovation processes. This dissertation deals with the above-mentioned topic from the viewpoint of the Lisbon goal of competitiveness in the knowledge economy. First, the author asks why the creative sector could play an important role in the knowledge economy, how this relates to the Lisbon Agenda, and whether the arguments available to date are sound. The relevant literature suggests mainly that the creative sector has a strong nexus with the economy nowadays, and that it has entered the post-Fordist cycle, i.e. human creativity, knowledge and innovation are at the basis of its competitiveness. [....] In future, the creative sector is expected to further grow in European countries, and this is related to the opportunities offered by the conjunction of the so-named "big three" - digitization, convergence and globalization. Public institutions' adaptation and response to the "big three" to foster creative firms' adaptation would unleash high growth for the creative sector. In addition, its growth could feed the ICT sector who calls for cultural content, inter alia. This may favour the ICT sector uptake, which is the key sector in the Lisbon Strategy. The author finds the main concern is about the precision of current statistics. Indeed, the present census for the creative sector only allows for indicative figures. Thus, further and sounder evidence is required. Even so, it can be concluded that the creative sector can play an important role within the knowledge-economy in Europe but this is much about prospects and it depends on the adaptation to the "big three" as fostered by the state itself. The corresponding role of the state in formulating policies to boost the creative sector is explored by analyzing a case study, i.e. the Creative Economy Programme in the UK. This has developed a whole approach

daviding says: I've only read the abstract, but my guess is that "creative sector" would somehow link to Richard Florida's "creative class". There's an interesting pointer to the "Lisbon strategy", with which I'm not familiar, and the "big three" of digitalization, convergence and globalization (of whom I'm not sure named as "the big three"

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

daviding says: I was sitting in a demonstration of IBM Rhapsody, where the simulation called out to some algorithms coded in Maxima.

OStatic: What products are your closest competitors? Viktor Toth: Maxima is in the same league as Mathematica or Maple. Perhaps a little less polished but in some ways, more powerful (I think for instance that the tensor algebra packages in Maxima can do things that cannot be done, at least not trivially, in other computer algebra systems.) Of course, it's also a LOT cheaper!

11. How is ontology different from object-oriented modeling? An ontology is different from object-oriented modeling (represented in UML) in several ways. First, the most profound difference is that the ontology technology is theoretically found on logic. While ontology allows automated reasoning or infer ence, object-oriented modeling does not. Another difference is the treatment of properties; while the ontology technology treats properties as the first-class citizen, the object-oriented modeling does not. That is, while the ontology technology allows inheritance of properties, the object-oriented modeling does not. While the ontology technology allows arbitrary user-defined relationships among classes (a type property), the object-oriented modeling limits the relationship types to the subclass-superclass hierarchical relationship. While the ontology technology allows adding properties to relationships such as symmetry, transitivity, and inversion so that they are used in reasoning, the object-oriented modeling does not. While the ontology technology allows multiple inheritances among classes and also among properties, the object-oriented modeling allows only single inheritances. Despite theses differences, object-oriented modeling and UML are accepted as a practical ontology specification, mostly because of their wide-spread use in industry and the multitude of existing models in UML. There is an on-going effort to add logic capability to object-oriented modeling, represented by OCL (Object Constraint Language).

daviding says: To improve our understanding of the science of service systems, I think that we need to get to the level of ontology vocabulary ... and probably no higher. SysML has features that UML doesn't ... which doesn't mean good or bad, just different.

daviding says: The argumentation schema is a template addition to the Compendium software, which is now open source. At the bottom of the web page is pointers to books and other software tools.

Argumentation Schemes are "patterns" for constructing and analysing arguments, and as these get familiar, you'll start hearing and reading differently as you listen to a debate on the radio, watch a documentary, or engage with a learning resource. A mental palette of argument schemes will help you spot when someone is making a certain kind of 'move' in a debate: you're better equipped to critique it. It'll also help when you have to put together your own case. Argument mapping tools can help analyse and construct arguments by rendering these moves as a visual palette of schemes.