2735
Globally, information systems are gaining prominence and their proliferation has been substantial considering the rate of adoption by the masses. Information systems facilitate design of solutions that are useful, usable, desirable, efficient, effective and different. People, technologies, and processes are brought together to address a problem by conceiving a solution that creates value for users. As a result, the world at large is witnessing a massive pace of digitization wherein businesses and governments are adopting different forms of information systems to connect to their customers in order to bring in a difference. As a result, increasingly the term “Digital” has been utilize to characterize such information systems.
Digital is far more pervasive now than it was previously and its mass adoption has enabled information generation and application in diverse areas. However, digital by itself is not beneficial to anyone. Only when Digital enables a sector/domain, it becomes useful.
Businesses have realized the importance of digital as a differentiator in customer engagements so as to stay competitive and relevant in their respective areas of business.
They have also realized that digital has transformed social interactions, customer relationships, as well as reshaped the ability to access and leverage information. They have experienced that business decisions are no longer based on opinions but on verifiable data.
To cope with this, businesses deal with interconnected, global systems that interact with multiple role players across multiple geographies, addressing multiple concerns of stakeholders across multiple disciplines by utilizing emerging technologies in a dynamic and challenging environment while providing near real time response and rich customer experience. Over the last few decades, product companies who were traditionally involved in creating digital solutions have moved into service businesses as the market for their core product has reached maturity. This is further prompted by the change in employment patterns, job opportunities, contribution to GDP and reduction in product sales and license fees. However, such companies need ways and means for improving and standardizing their services as the reputation for the quality of their services is generally poor affecting their customer’s loyalty and brand image. Since digital has standardized quality in other domains, it is obvious that digital can provide key advantages to these companies by improving quality of their services. In this discussion, such digitally enhanced/enabled services are considered as digital services. Digital service is an integration of people, processes, infrastructure and digital technologies, which are independent and operable, and which are networked together for a period of time to deliver a service for the benefit of another entity or the entity itself in real world. The formation of the digital service is not a permanent phenomenon but rather a necessity for integrating and networking the different components to achieve the desired quality levels for the service. The digital service emerges from a combination of the constituent elements (people, processes, infrastructure, and digital technologies), the interactions between themselves and their interactions with the customer’s environment.
While delivering digital services, businesses need to deal with interconnected, global systems, interact with collection of related services, multiple geographies, multiple stakeholders with differing concerns, multiple disciplines, emerging technologies, dynamic and challenging environment, interconnectivity and variety, near real time response and rich customer experience. Digital services design aims at synthesizing services that are useful, usable and desirable from the consumer perspective, and efficient, effective and different from the provider perspective. It brings together people, skills, technology, methods and tools to address change and create value for customers. It involves solving multiple problems across multiple disciplines. It is iterative and requires participation of several stakeholders’ along with relevant domain experts. Existing service design methodologies are implicitly software/product design methodologies and they require tweaking to be applied in a servicing situation.
Applying the same mind-set to designing a service as to the design of product/software will lead to solutions that are possibly not appropriate to the servicing scenario. Services cannot be treated in the same way that software are treated and it is necessary to have a different perspective for designing services. Currently, while numerous architectural frameworks and service design approaches as well as numerous digitization case-studies exist, a unified systematic approach for designing digital services does not exist. In this workshop, the foundational concepts and the underlying processes for an approach to design digital services is presented.
Keywords: Information Systems, Services, Digital Solutions, Digital Services, Architecting Digital Services, Transforming Digital Solutions, Enabling Services