Modelling Services as Socio-technical Systems ...and analysing such - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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Modelling Services as Socio-technical Systems ...and analysing such models

Nicola Guarino (*) Nicolas Troquard

National Research Council of Italy Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technology Laboratory for Applied Ontology, Trento (*) Joint work with Roberta Ferrario, partly done in the framework of a cooperation with SAP Research, Karlsruhe

What is a socio-technical system

• Think of a vending machine: it is useless if somebody doesn’t

properly supply it

• Think of a business directory (yellow pages): it is useless if it is

not regularly updated in order to reflect the actual situation

• Think of an e-commerce service, like Amazon.com: much more

than just a Web interface!

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The socio-technical systems perspective

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• $
• More a perspective on factors affecting work than a theory of

the system itself

• Set of principles for taking the social system into account

[Bostrom & Heinen 1977]

A change of shift: from principles to models

• Nature and structure of main components:
• People
• Technical artifacts (agentive and non-agentive)
• Organizations
• Natural context
• Nature of their interactions
• Person-artifact
• Person-Person
• Person-Organization
• Organization-Organization
• Artifact-Natural context
• ...
• We need a comprehensive ontological theory!

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Ontology of socio-technical systems:

• ur approach

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• Develop a foundational ontology, as a rigorous basis for

understanding the essential features of people, technical artifacts, and their mutual interactions

• Ontology of social reality
• Ontology of functionality and technical artifacts
• Adopt a failure-oriented approach, as a way to “keep our

feet on the ground”, focusing on the most important practical aspect of socio-technical systems:

• Understanding
• Controlling
• Living with... their failures!!

From ontology-driven information systems to ontology-driven socio-technical systems

The importance of transparent models for cooperative failure recovery

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Self-organisation TIME Crisis Formal

• rganisation

Start of the crisis EFFICIENCY

• Fig. 1 The dynamics of self-organisation and institutional mechanisms in crisis situations: the case of

Hurricane Katrina. The self-organisation phenomena (grey curve) depicts the action of teams of volunteers who spontaneously tried to re-establish communications and who offered their help. The black curve shows the evolution of the formal organisation. Note that the amplitude of the curves and their development over time does not have an absolute value and is shown only to illustrate the positioning of the self-organisation phenomena in crisis situations.

Pavard et al. 2006

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The need for a global view of services

• Current Web services models focus on the external interface,

advocating its strict separation from the internal view: roughly, a service is a transfer function from an input state to an output state

• Yet, business applications need to specify
• how the service is performed at the business level, referring to internal

details whose nature varies a lot from service to service

• when the various processes involved in a service occur
• Business applications need to monitor and evaluate services quality

with respect to their actual impact on the whole service system, which includes external events, objects, people, organizations... (context- aware services) [example: a directory service]

• Service Level Agreeements need to refer both to internal and

contextual details

• Well-known gap between business services and IT
• Need to look inside the black box and out of the box...

Looking outside the box

• Taking people and society into account
• Putting people in the loop: from users to actors
• Putting social interactions in the loop
• Putting social institutions in the loop
• Taking external environment into account
• External natural environment
• Internal aspects of artifacts
• Interfaces (sensors)

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Looking inside the box

• Cognitive transparency, to support:
• At design time
• participatory, concurrent, agile design
• At run time
• governance
• control

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Is this a service?

The 2011 Cambridge Service Alliance grand challenge: understanding the “Safer Sutton” service system. Is reducing fear of crime in Sutton a service?

In search of identity criteria for services

• Services should be counted, and located in space and time:
• Is there a fire extinguishing service here (and now)?
• how many restaurants are located in the Province of Trento?

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Services vs. goods

• Services are not kinds of goods (immaterial goods), since

there is a radical difference between goods and services [Hill 77]:

• Goods are transactable and transferable
• Services are transactable, buy they are not transferable
• Why are they not transferable?

because services have a temporal nature, they are EVENTS!

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Two different notions of services as events

• Action-based: passing the salt is a service
• Commitment-based: a previous commitment is needed.
• Paying for a service vs. finding a service
• Service delivery vs. service offer
• Terminological solution:
• What is delivered is the service content
• A service implies always a commitment
• Occasional favors are not services.

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Services are based on commitments

service commitment

• guarantees the execution of some type of actions,
• n the occurrence of a certain triggering event,
• in the interest of another agent
• upon prior agreement
• according to a certain specification (service description)
• which constraints the way service actions will be performed (service

process)

• How can you tell that a service is present, here and now?
• ...if somebody is committed to do something here and now

service as value co-creation vs. service as commitment to value co- creation

Service and service system lifecycle

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Describing a service: Mapping thematic roles to service roles

• Commitment agent
• Commitment beneficiary
• Core action agent
• Core action beneficiary
• Core action patient
• Core action instrument

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• Service provider
• Service customer
• Service producer
• Service consumer
• Service object

Bad (?) news: OWL can’t be used for this! (as co-reference of variables is needed)

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Services and Value Exchange

• Properly speaking, value is not exchanged. Value is

experienced by an agent, at a given time

• Internally to a service’s value chain (at the interface between

the service process and the service consumer), multiple kinds

• f value-cogeneration-transfers may occur:
• Transfers of goods
• Transfers of rights
• Transfers of duties
• Value attribution for services is strongly linked to their

temporal aspects

• …in different ways: some services cost more if they are quick,
• thers if they last longer…

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Service lifecycle Consumer's needs awareness Service search Negotiation Service delivery After sale Customer's awareness achievement Provider's awareness achievement Search for providers Search for customers Evaluation Monitoring Provider's cost Customer's benefit Customer's cost Provider's benefit Service Exploitation Payment Service value exchange

affects

Value flow P -> C Value flow C -> P

affects affects affects

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Conclusions: event-centric business modeling

• What are the basic events (out of the box)?
• Where are they located, in space an time?
• Which are their participants (human and non-human)?
• What are their natural boundaries?
• What are the key documents (so-called “business artifacts”)

determining the business evolution?