| Publication Date | Publication Title | Author(s) | Form |
|---|---|---|---|
| October 2008 | "SSMED and SOA: Service Science, Management, Engineering and Design and Service Oriented Architecture" [view presentation] |
David Ing | presentation slides in conference proceedings, and presentation slides, for Cascon 2008 |
| September 2008 | "Offerings as Commitments and Context: Service Systems from a Language Action Perspective" [view abstract, article and presentation] |
David Ing | article in conference proceedings, and presentation slides, for UKSS 2008 |
| July 2008 | "Business Models and Evolving Economic Paradigms: A Systems Science Approach" [view abstract, article and presentation] |
David Ing | article in conference proceedings, and presentation slides, for ISSS 2008 |
| November 2007 | "Services Engineering and Management, Value Coproduction, and Situated Practices" [view introduction and chapter] |
David Ing | chapter in research report, following SEM 2006 |
| October 2005 | "Negotiated Order and Network Form Organizations" [view abstract] |
Annaleena Parhankangas, David Ing, David L. Hawk, Gosia Dane, and Marianne Kosits | article published in Systems Research and Behavioral Science |
Pre-2005 content is available at the Systemic Business Publications page.
Annaleena Parhankangas, David Ing, David L. Hawk, Gosia Dane, and Marianne Kosits
Throughout the 20th century, the industrial age roots of hierarchical top-down planning and command-and-control supervision have been the foundations for management thinking. At the beginning of the 21st century, many futurists and systems thinkers have widely declared that businesses must equip themselves to be more responsive to rapidly changing environments. Dynamic, knowledge-based businesses require that rigid forms of business governance give way to networked forms.
Since many successful businesses have shifted from autonomous independent enterprises to building alliances and inter-organizational relationships, we advocate a renewed examination of negotiated order and a focus on the fluidity enabled by it. The traditional advantages of legal order are being outweighed by its inherent rigidity. Under conditions of rapid change, maintaining an internally consistent set of rules, essential to legal order, is inefficient and relatively ineffective.
Systems of negotiated order are characterized by situational coordination of interests, flexible definitions of desired end states, and spontaneous initiatives by interested stakeholders. We examine the development of the Linux community and its negotiated system of self-governance, and offer three additional business examples that suggest how negotiated order may provide a platform for stakeholders to innovatively leverage the dynamics of the contemporary environment.
Annaleena Parhankangas, David Ing, David L. Hawk, Gosia Dane, and Marianne Kosits, "Negotiated Order and Network Form Organizations", in Systems Research and Behavioral Science, Volume 22, Number 5, (October 2005), pp. 431-452.
David Ing
Service businesses are not new. For many services businesses, however, the “world is flat” context (Friedman, 2005) of globalized scale and ubiquitous information and communication technologies (ICT) is new. The “world is flat” viewpoint sees global economics and politics as reshaped by three great flatteners: (a) new players (i.e. India, China and other developing countries rather than local competitors); on (b) a new playing field (i.e. global marketplaces and resources rather than regional) that are (c) coordinated through horizontal collaboration (i.e. inter-organizational alliances rather than vertically-integrated firms). The provision of services described in service-dominant logic (Vargo & Lusch, 2004) that are based on invisible and intangible resources – e.g. competences or processes – may be impacted more in this new context than the delivery of physical goods. Physical goods with distribution costs mean that local providers have a cost advantage over remote providers. Services that take advantage of ICT, however, can relocate work at flat or near-zero costs. The decision to assign many service production activities to another continent is practically as easy as assigning it across town. Value coproduction that does not require face-to-face coordination can be rethought in this new frame.
Thirty years ago, the idea of service from an automated banking machine (ABM) was new. Over the past five years, customers phoning a toll-free number are no longer surprised to be served by a pool of company representatives that are half a world away. If the more automated alternative of self-service over a secure connection on a web browser is chosen, the location of the originator and service provider is even less relevant. The research into management and engineering of customer experiences of this type is far from mature.
This paper proposes adding two additional contexts for consideration into the emerging framework for service engineering and management:
Engineering service businesses for a “world is flat” context requires designing business architectures in which networks of customers, suppliers and alliance partners maintain consistent levels of quality, while allowing for minor variances in ends and means. Resources managed through ICT mediation can instantaneously (re-)route the work of service delivery personnel, intelligent information infrastructures and distributed physical locations for handling. Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) introduces both benefits of and challenges to distributed expertise and their coordination. Principles of management and engineering that do not directly deal with the capability to electronically automate or relocate work may require revision for this new paradigm.
Offshore call centres have become an everyday way of doing business in the first decade of a new millennium. Examples of similar impacts in services across many other industries can be listed. In media and entertainment businesses, the production and distribution of digital content — in music, movies and video — is making physical media irrelevant. Retailing in product categories ranging from books to consumer electronics has drawn volume away from “bricks and mortar” infrastructure towards web portals on the Internet. Academic education and professional training, scheduled as e-learning conducted asynchronously and at a distance, reduces attendance at campus facilities. Health care no longer needs to be bounded by the memory of a local physician, as diagnoses and prescriptions can be digitized and distributed across a virtual team. All of these examples point to opportunities and challenges for service businesses, as leaders transform through their business models to leave laggards behind.
David Ing, "Services Engineering and Management, Value Coproduction, and Situated Practices", in Research Perspectives in Service Engineering and Management, Volume 1, (Saara A. Brax, editor), Innovation Management Institute, report number 20, 2007, pp. 151-166
David Ing
For professionals at the beginning of the 21st century, much of the conventional wisdom on business management and engineering is founded in the 20th century industrial / manufacturing paradigm. In developed economies, however, the service sector now dominates the manufacturing sector, just as manufacturing prevailed over the agricultural sector after the industrial revolution. Simultaneously, as end products have transitioned from material outputs to information in digital form, traditional business models are under siege. The economic sociology in this new world challenges the integrity of models, methods and interventions successful in an earlier paradigm.
Since 2005, IBM has encouraged universities to develop a new field of Services Science, Management and Engineering (SSME). Researchers are responding with development of a new science of service systems, but mature foundations will require years of collaboration. In the absence of a well-established science from which educational curricula can be deduced, teachers can develop educational programs for joint learning, guided inductively by relevance and pragmatism.
A new seminar on business models – ways in which business organizations operate and evolve – is proposed. Complementing traditional management and/or engineering curricula, this course challenges students to reconsider contexts, surface assumptions and explore alternative approaches to business. With a domain that includes both human and technological parts, systems science serves as a skeleton on which content can be structured.
Keywords: service science, systems science, business models, economic
David Ing, "Business Models and Evolving Economic Paradigms: A Systems Science Approach ", Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Conference of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, (Jennifer Wilby, editor), presented at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, July 16, 2008.
David Ing
The rise of the service economy contributes to turbulence in today’s world of business. This paper responds to the call for a new science of service systems with an approach based in the language-action perspective.
This understanding of service systems is founded on the concepts of offerings and co-production developed by Richard Normann and Rafael Ramirez. It is extended with a model of conversation for action by Fernando Flores and Terry Winograd, and a commitment management protocol by Stephan Haeckel.
Commitments to four types of obligations based in language-action are described, and placed in a larger context of peripheral events, language and action.
Keywords: service systems, offerings, co-production, language-action, commitments, context
David Ing, "Offerings as Commitments and Context: Service Systems from a Language Action Perspective ", Systemicist, volume 30, number 2 (Christine Welch and Jennifer M. Wilby, editors), pp. 154-172, presented at the UK Systems Society International Conference, St. Anne's College, Oxford, September 1, 2008.
Received the Best Student Paper Award for the UKSS 2008 Conference.
This workshop will identify critical SOA research challenges that need to be addressed by the research community for SOA to fulfill its promise. The workshop will present a taxonomy of SOA research issues that will be used to frame the rest of the discussion. The workshop will focus on research needs that are currently causing the greatest pain for SOA practitioners. Topics will include "hard problems", tooling issues, governance challenges, monitoring through the life cycle, and the longer-term evolution of SOA. The workshop will include presentations by practitioners and the research community in addressing critical unmet issues.
David Ing
David Ing, "SSMED and SOA: Service Science, Management, Engineering and Design and Service Oriented Architecture ", presented at the CASCON workshop on SOA Research Challenges: Current Progress and Future Challenges,(Dennis Smith, Grace Lewis, Kostas Kontogiannis, and Marin Litoiu, co-chairs), Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada, October 30, 2008.