ACIS 2010 Track Service Engineering & Management

The

21st Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS2010)

will be held in Brisbane, Australia, from 1-3 December 2010. ACIS is the premier conference in Australasia for Information Systems academics and professionals, covering technical, organisational, business and social issues in the application of Information Technology.

Conference Track on Service Management and Engineering

Submissions
ACIS 2010 calls for original, unpublished research papers (i.e. completed research and research-in-progress) in the areas defined in the conference track descriptions. All submissions must be in English and be made via the ACIS 2010 submission system at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=acis2010 by 12 July 2010. For more details about submission formats, expectations and the review process, please click here.

Important Dates:
Paper submission deadline:	12 July 2010
Notification of paper acceptance:	17 September 2010
ACIS 2010 Conference:	1-3 December 201

Track Chairs:

Axel Korthaus
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
axel.korthaus@qut.edu.au

Tilo Böhmann
International Business School of Service Management Hamburg, Germany
boehmann@iss-hamburg.de

Erwin Fielt
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
e.fielt@qut.edu.au

Julien Vayssière
Smart Services CRC, Sydney, Australia
Julien.Vayssiere@smartservicescrc.com.au

Theme
Services dominate developed economies such as the USA, the EU, Australia, and others. This dominant position can not only be ascribed to the sheer size of the services sector in the overall economy, but also to the potential of services for creating economic growth and welfare through considerable opportunities for productivity gains. Moreover, it is not only business where a service perspective has become more prominent, also in IT the service concept has gained ground as is evident in developments like Services Sciences, Management, Engineering and Design (SSMED), IT Service Management, Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), Service Computing and various “XYZas- a-Service” concepts. With business and IT becoming more and more aligned, there is a need for understanding how these two service worlds meet and to be aware of their complementarities and differences.

As the number of services grows and the differences between business and IT services blur, Business Service Management becomes crucial: the explicit management of these services as important business assets that are the focal points for the cost-effective creation of customer value and innovation in organisations. Business Service Management should leverage, integrate and complement the different Service Management approaches. From the IT perspective on Business Service Management, the paradigm of service orientation has been successfully applied on the technical level to design and implement very flexible and adaptable IT infrastructures and architectures for some time now. Service lifecycle management and service enablement approaches that aim towards implementing services as encapsulations of autonomous, valuable software capabilities are of importance in this context. However, this service paradigm recently also extends towards the business level and provides new perspectives to organise a company’s capabilities and to allow for the easy combination of services to create new business opportunities. In this sense, services can be seen as building blocks for organisational and market arrangements in service networks and ecosystems. On the business level, challenges related to the design of appropriate service value management, including service-enabled strategies, service-oriented business models, service portfolio
management, service governance etc. and service relationship management with suppliers and customers need to be met. Also on the business level, information technology represents one of the most important drivers and enablers of service innovation, and the service paradigm provides the opportunity for further advancing the widely postulated business/IT alignment.

Suggested topics
This track aims at accelerating high quality research in the fast developing domain of Service Management and Engineering and the related areas within Service Science (1) and Services Computing (2) from an Information System’s perspective. It seeks, in correspondence with the ACIS 2010 conference theme, contributions that demonstrate how the IS discipline can make a high impact in the academic and practical community by addressing the way organisations face the challenges of the progressing service-oriented economy that increasingly merges business- and IT-related service concepts. It invites conceptual and empirical papers on completed research as well as research-in-progress papers. Possible contributions may include, but are not limited to the following:

Service Management from an IS Perspective

• Service strategy & value management
• Service quality management
• Service innovation management
• Service portfolio & capability management
• Service governance & performance management
• Service compliance & risk management
• Service supply chain management

Service Engineering from an IS Perspective

• Service lifecycle
• New service development
• Service modelling, analysis & design
• Service bundling
• Service standards & descriptions

Special topics on Information Systems and Services

• The position of IS in Service Science, Management and Engineering
• New business models in service ecosystems, e.g. for service aggregation and brokerage
• IS/IT services from a service(-dominant) logic; servitisation of industries
• Implications of value co-creation for IT-based services
• Service business alignment / Aligning Business and IT Service Management
• Business impact of IT service management
• Embedding of IT services in business products and services
• Design and Implementation and effects of automation and self-service technologies for IT services
• Services E-commerce (i.e. electronic offering, trading, and purchasing of services)

Significance of this track and coverage at related outlets
Service management on both the business level and the IT level is a buzzing topic as is apparent in the increasing emphasis on the Service Economy, the promotion of Services Sciences, Management, Engineering and Design (SSMED) by IBM and others, the rise of Service Management in IT (e.g. ITIL v3), the developments in the area of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), and the growing importance of service as a sourcing model for software (e.g. Software-as-a-Service, SaaS). In Australia, services receive considerable attention in the research community, e.g. in the vation, foresight and productivity improvements for the services sector, as well as in the teaching community, e.g. the Services Science Management and Engineering (SSME) Learning and Teaching Project funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council. Service management starts to become addressed in a great variety of well-established and newly created, dedicated conferences and journals, such as ECIS, ICIS, AMCIS, ICSOC, APSCC, SCC, the German-language community IS conference (last event with 1200+ attending with conference theme “Business Services: Concepts, Technologies, Applications”) etc. and IBM Systems Journal, Business and Information Systems Engineering (BISE), Information Systems Management, Asian-Pacific Journal of Information Systems, among others. Moreover, the AIS has launched a special interest group for services, covering IT services, IT Service Management, and SSME.

List of Associate Editors

• Prof Gerhard Satzger, Director, Karlsruhe Service Research Institute (KSRI), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
• Prof Marlon Dumas (University of Tartu, Estonia)
• Assoc Prof Harry Bouwman (TU Delft, the Netherlands)
• Assoc Prof Aileen Cater-Steel (University of Southern Queensland, Australia)
• Dr Alistair Barros (SAP Research, Brisbane, Australia)
• Dr Timber Haaker (Novay, the Netherlands)

Potential journal special issue or awards

• Journal special issue
  • We plan to give authors of the best papers in the ACIS 2010 Service Management and Design track the opportunity to submit an extended version of their work to a special issue of The Journal of Strategic Information Systems (JSIS).
• Best Paper in the Track Award
  • We plan to ask the reviewers of paper submissions to suggest candidates for the best paper in the track. Based on this feedback, the winner of this award will be determined. The award for the best (“smartest”) track paper will be an iTunes gift card sponsored by the Smart Services CRC.
• Best Reviewer in the Track Award
  • We plan to ask the authors of paper submissions to suggest candidates for the best reviewer in the track. Based on this feedback, the winner of this award will be determined.

Track chairs

Dr Axel Korthaus is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in QUT’s BPM Group, one of the largest BPM research groups in the world. He received his PhD degree in 2001 from the University of Mannheim, Germany, and brings to bear comprehensive experience as a researcher, lecturer and project manager in areas such as service management and collaborative, component-based software development. Besides managing and conducting research in an ARC Linkage project titled “Service Ecosystems Management for Collaborative Process Improvement”, which involves SAP Research Brisbane and the Queensland Government, Department of Public Works, as partners, Axel is also actively shaping the research conducted in the Smart Services CRC “Business Service Management” project. He is an author/editor of various books, journal articles and conference papers, serves as a regular PC member and speaker at IS- and SE-related conferences, organizes workshops and sessions and has presented his work in 11 countries over the last years.

Prof Tilo Boehmann is a Full Professor of Service Management at the International Business School of Service Management (ISS) in Hamburg, Germany. At ISS, he builds a new Service Management Research Group and the shapes the school’s MBA service management program after holding an appointment as research group leader and assistant professor at the Technische Universität München. His main teaching and research interests are service management and design, with a special interest in IT services and solutions, as well as strategic information management. Tilo has published widely in these areas in international and national journals and conferences. He is very active in the field of service science, management and engineering (SSME), being appointed member of a national service science task force of Germany’s federal ministry of research and education. Tilo holds a Habilitation from Technische Universität München (TUM), a PhD from Hohenheim University (Stuttgart, Germany) and a Master of Science in IS from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Dr Erwin Fielt is currently a senior researcher at the Business Process Management Group
of the Queensland University of Technology. In his research, he focuses on the intersection
between business and IT, where new IT applications have to result in net benefits for individuals and organisations. Erwin Fielt is involved as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Business Service Management project of the Smart Services CRC. Within this project, he is responsible for coordinating the involvement of the different academic and industry partners and he conducts research on Service Management, Service Oriented Business Models, Service Portfolio Management and Service Quality. Erwin Fielt has a PhD from the Delft University of Technology and a MSc from the University of Twente, both in the Netherlands. He has published in different IS journals, conferences and books on services, business models, and electronic business.

Dr Julien Vayssière is Head of Research at the Smart Services CRC, a commercially focused collaborative research initiative, developing innovation, foresight and productivity
improvements for the services sector. Julien holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Nice, France and has been performing research on computer security and distributed software architectures for both industrial and academic organisations.

(1) See, for example, Pinhanez, C. and Kontogiorgis, P. (2008): A Proposal for a Service Science Discipline
Classification System. Presented at the 2008 Frontiers of Service.Washington, DC. October 2 -5, 2008 (Available
at http://www.smith.umd.edu/frontiers2008/pdfs_docs/Pinhanez.pdf)
(2) See, for example, Zhang, L-J. (2008): EIC Editorial: Introduction to the Knowledge Areas of Services Computing.
IEEE Transactions on Services Computing 1(2), 62-71.

Towards a service portfolio management framework

Services in the form of business services or IT-enabled (Web) 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 gap motivated this paper, in which we explore the concept of Service Portfolio Management. In particular, we propose a Service Portfolio Management Framework that explicates service portfolio goals, tasks, governance issues, methods and enablers. The Service Portfolio Management Framework is based upon a thorough analysis and consolidation of existing, well-established portfolio management approaches. From an academic point of view, the Service Portfolio Management Framework can be positioned as an extension of portfolio management conceptualisations in the area of service management. Based on the framework, possible directions for future research are provided. From a practical point of view, the Service Portfolio Management Framework provides an organisation with a novel approach to managing its emerging service portfolios.

See here for more information.

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...