CRC Smart Services Scholarships

The Business Service Management project is looking for students who are interested in starting a research project and there are CRC Smart Services has scholarships available for this. Please, contact us if you have an interest in this area by leaving a comment in this post.

The need for Service Portfolio Management

Services in the form of Business Services or Software Services have become a corporate asset of high interest in striving towards the agile organisation. However, while the design and management of a single service is widely studied and well understood, little is known about how a set of services can be managed. This requires Service Portfolio Management. However, Portfolio Management in the context of Service Oriented Enterprises, Service Ecosystems and Service Oriented Architectures is still an ill-understood area. On the one hand, one can make use of existing Portfolio Management approaches to understand the goals and methods, such as maximizing the financial value by making use of financial parameters, such as ROI. On the one hand, there are the unique characteristics of services and service orientation that may require new or adapted approaches. In particular, we envision that the tasks for Service Portfolio Management require particular attention. A service portfolio should support the decision-making process in regard to managing the service lifecycle: the introduction of new services, the improvement or change of existing services (including versioning), and the retirement of existing services. In addition, it should also support business decisions geared towards the bundling of multiple services into one package, the commercialisation of services and the sourcing of services. The major premise of portfolio management is that these decisions are made taking the dependencies between services into account. Finally, the contextual factor has to be taken into account, such as, the number of services, the openness of the service portfolio and the dynamics of the service portfolio.

BSM Whitepaper on Business Service Management

I'm very happy to be able to announce the public availabiliy of the first CRC White Paper, which presents our view of a Business Service Management Framework. It includes and extends the high-level view of Business Service Management outlined in earlier posts of this blog.

The paper has been authored by Michael Rosemann, Erwin Fielt, Thomas Kohlborn and Axel Korthaus from Queensland University of Technology, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution‐Noncommercial‐No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License, and is hopefully the first in a long series of upcoming white papers adressing in more detail different aspects of "Smart Services" in general and Business Service Management in particular.

The paper can be downloaded here: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/26620/.

Any comments, remarks, opinions etc. are very welcome! We are very interested in your feedback. (The contact details of the authors can be found at the end of the paper.)

Cheers,
Axel

The Smart Services CRC Research Initiative

The "Business Service Management" project, which is part of the Australian Smart Services CRC research initiative, aims at providing methods and tools to identify and create business processes and services and to plan and prioritise investments into delivering services and into streamlining business processes that produce and consume these services. It develops a business strategy approach to identify new or improved services and map to creation.

The Smart Services CRC is a $120m, commercially focused collaborative research initiative, developing innovation, foresight and productivity improvements for the services sector. Services is the largest sector of the economy representing approximately 80% of Australia’s GDP and 85% of employment. Within the services industries Smart Services’ initial programmes will be customer-focused with outcomes translatable across the whole services sector. Initial research outcomes and demonstrators will principally be associated with the digital media, finance and government sectors (including the health sector) to develop exciting new capabilities and demonstrate the breadth of the applicability of our work.

Smart Services is a research and development partnership between 10 major industry players and six Australian universities, funded by the private sector and governments under the Australian Government’s Cooperative Research Centre program. Its aim is the creation of research-enabled commercial outcomes for its partners.

Major investors and partners include Fairfax Digital, Infosys, RACQ, SAP, Sensis, Suncorp, Telstra Business, Telstra Enterprise & Government, AARNet, Austin Health, the NSW and Queensland State Governments, Queensland University of Technology, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Swinburne University of Technology, University of New South Wales, University of Sydney, and University of Wollongong.

What is "Business Service Management"? - Part 2

Introduction

Business Service Management (BSM) is the business discipline dedicated to the holistic management of services in an organisation to ensure alignment between the needs of the customer and the objectives of the organisation. The explicit management of services in organisations is required as services have become focal units for the cost-effective creation of customer value and innovation. Moreover, services can be seen as building blocks for organisational and market arrangements in service networks and ecosystems. Finally, information technology is an important enabler and driver of service innovation, and the service paradigm provides the opportunity for further progressing the widely postulated business/IT alignment.

Business Service Management deals with the service orientation of the organisation and the provisioning and use of specific business services. The term business service describes an autonomous transformational capability that is offered to and consumed by external or internal customers for their benefit. The prefix ‘business’ stresses that such a service has a customer value, requires the ability to be managed internally as a corporate asset or product and that its implementation is technology-agnostic. While Business Service Management includes any type of service (e.g., the non-automated expert advice of a lawyer), it does pay special attention to enabling business services with the driving and enable role of information technology.

Business Service Management is dedicated to the overarching and potentially enterprise-wide development of a service management capability. On a business level, it captures the design of appropriate service-enabled strategies, service-oriented business models, service portfolio management, service program management, service project management and service operations management. On a technical level, it comprises approaches that aim towards implementing services as encapsulations of autonomous, valuable software capabilities.

Business Service Management can be driven by customer demands and by provider capabilities. From a demand-driven viewpoint, it translates external or internal requirements via customer-facing activities (e.g., Service Marketing) into service specifications for internal or external providers. As a capability-driven discipline it ensures that the promising benefits of Service-oriented Architectures are appropriately complemented by a corresponding and comprehensively defined service management discipline. This requires the definition of multiple levels of service-centred views on the organisation in addition to the predominant process, data or application views. BSM is a critical boundary spanner between external and internal service stakeholders and a key facilitator in the further progression of a service-centred view of the firm.

Business Service Management can be seen as a discipline and body of knowledge that is in development, just like Business Process Management was 10 years ago. The ambition of Business Service Management is to provide a focal point for service-related issues, irrespective of their origin in business or technology. Its scope depends upon the role that services play in organisations. It is one of the more fundamental contributions of BSM to identify the opportunities for service-orientation in the organisation, for example with respect to market offerings, internal capabilities and technological support. It also can drive the required organisational transformation. Its role in the organisation is complementary to other business management areas, such as Business Process Management, Marketing Management and Information Technology Management. Because of its relationships with many areas BSM will often be a bridging discipline and perform a coordinating role.

Figure 1: Business Service Management Framework - Overview

Here, we define a Business Service Management Framework (Figure 1) that provides a reference model for the development of enterprise-wide service-related capabilities. The Business Service Management Framework has been developed as part of a project within the Smart Services CRC research initiative (www.smartservicescrc.com.au). The framework consists of four clusters. The core of this framework is (1) Service Lifecycle Management covering all stages from service initiation to service retirement. (2) Service Value Management ensures the creation of business value by services and the integration of service-centred activities into the corporate landscape. (3) Service Relationship Management covers the integration with customers and suppliers of services. All these activities are supported by (4) Service Enablement consisting of three management functions addressing quality, data and technology. These four clusters are discussed in more detail in the following sections.

It has to be stressed that the Business Service Management Framework focuses on management activities and should be seen as orthogonal to any roles that may emerge within a service ecosystem (e.g., Service Provider, Service Broker). For the purpose of this framework, we consciously abstract from these roles and refer simply to service provider and service consumer acknowledging that the actual interactions may involve many more partners. Provider and consumer may also be entities within the same organisation. We also simply refer to a service but recognise that a service will in many cases be an aggregated service, i.e. it will consist of multiple services.

The actual term ‘Business Service Management’ is obviously inspired by the Business Process Management (BPM) discipline. Like BPM, BSM captures the organisational, managerial and technical aspects of a particular set of organisational assets (services as opposed to processes). The close proximity of processes and services will motivate many organisations to utilise a comparable set or principles, rules, concepts etc. for BPM and BSM. Similar to Business Process Management we also do not envision that BSM necessarily will demand its own organisational overhead in the form of dedicated Business Service Managers or even a BSM Centre of Excellence.

Nevertheless, we see BSM and the entire ‘service-based view of the firm’ as an alternative managerial paradigm that depending on the nature of an organisation may even play a more important role than BPM and its inherent process-based view of the firm. In most cases, however, we see BPM and BSP as highly complementary approaches. BPM has over the last decade sensitised organisations for their business processes, and the critical role these play. On top of this increased process awareness, BSM now adds a service-centred view across business processes and facilitates the utilisation of economies of scale for those services that contribute to multiple processes (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Complementing the Process View (left) with a Service View (right)

In many of its proposed elements, Business Service Management will be able to build on existing organisational capabilities and ‘just’ extend these with a service flavour. For example, Service Analysis relies heavily on enterprise modelling capabilities and will use available data or process models as an important source for the identification of potential services. Beyond these existing artefacts and capabilities, however, dedicated service modelling expertise is required to capture the various services and the plethora of their interrelationships in dedicated service models. These models then need to be put into context with other models under the umbrella of a comprehensive enterprise architecture.

to be continued...

What is "Business Service Management"?

Management Summary

Business Service Management describes the emerging discipline dedicated to the IT-enabled management of services as corporate assets. Business Service Management deals with the overall service orientation of the organisation and the provisioning and use of business services. The term business service describes an autonomous transformational capability that is offered to and consumed by external or internal customers for their benefit. The prefix ‘business’ stresses that such a service has a market value, requires the ability to be managed internally as a corporate asset and that its implementation is technology-agnostic. While business services (or so called capabilities) have attracted the attention of many vendors and organizations, a lack of understanding of the activities required for the successful management of such business services remains a critical issue. In order to fill this gap, a framework consisting of Service Lifecycle Management, Service Value Management, Service Relationship Management and Service Enablement is proposed. This Framework has the potential to provide organisations with the much needed guidance in their attempts to convert current IT-driven service initiatives into successful service-centric business models.

to be continued...

A warm welcome!

Welcome, dear reader, to this brand-new blog on "Business Service Management (BSM)"!

In the context of a large Australian research initiative, the Smart Services CRC, and the ARC project "Service Ecosystems Management", members of QUT's Business Process Management Group together with their project partners from industry and government are currently shaping and advancing the field of "Business Service Management" (see next blog entry).

This blog is intended as a forum for cutting-edge information and discussions about this topic, targeting the active contribution of an audience that might consist of enterprises, companies, organisations, institutions, researchers and private people interested in BSM.

In the days to come, this blog will be filled with a lot of very useful information about the research conducted in this exciting emerging discipline and will hopefully function as an ignition spark for fruitful discussions and the emergence of a community of interest in this topic...