The folks over at the AT ONE project are studying service innovation and have some very cool and practical ideas. Ideas that really excite me, because they talk to my ideas about the digital society (my first post here). After a recent network meeting where AT ONE was presented, I was reflecting on my experiences at a client engagement involving the de-merger and subsquent merger of a business unit. Working with the service management aspects of this engagement, I am struck by the challenges many service orientated businesses face..... and lack of understanding of the nature of services!

My personal learning experience has come from concealing the complexity of the service concept while engaging with people from management and operations. And in trying to understand the anatomy of a service. My Ah-ha! experience has been in recognizing the subtle difference between "customer care" and "customer service". Customer care is what service-orientated businesses MUST offer their customers -- not as a service but as an activity to take care of their customers. This fundamental shift of mindset will open the way for businesses to think about creating experiences for customers.

Many years ago, when working with eLearning technologies, we designed solutions for customer-education for a Telco who was launching ADSL to the mass-market. I recall this huge gulf that separated those who built the order management solution and those who built the customer portal. I believe this gulf was there largely due to this fundamental lack of understanding of the service concept within the organization -- as in "ADSL service vs Customer Service" ---- and a dysfunctional business operating model (a case of chicken and the egg?)

A service is not a product, it is an effect brought about by a provider for a receiver, based on mutually acceptable terms and conditions. The focus of this exchange is on "What" and not "How" -- so the means by which the provider produces the effect need not be disclosed to the receiver and vice versa for the receiver's use of the service. I believe it is up to the provider to find the right balance between functional, commercial, legal, technical and aesthetic elements of the service to create an experience for the receiver that actually addresses his/her intentions.

As a business architect, I am looking to explore the anatomy of the service so that we can model services in a manner that captures provider and receiver perspectives. One of the things such a model will hopefully provide, is the basis to establish quality-of-service parameters that create more transparency, objectivity and automation to service delivery and management. To narrow my scope, I am interested in services provided by government. To that end, I feel it is crucial to consider (a) the dualism of consumer and citizen in each individual (the "consumerzen") and (b) an intention-based approach to engage with consumerzens.

As value creation in our societies comes increasingly from service-based activity, we must rid ourselves of the antiquated concept of "customer service". For welfare-based societies like mine (Norway) we must move fast to harvest our experiences in creating services so that we can take this to the multi-polar world. What I mean by that is for another blogpost.

Looks like ISPs are in for competition from a new source -- device manufacturers. Last week HTC announced HTCmail - a service powered by Microsoft's Hosted Exchange offering.
See http://www.htc.com/press_room/03-press-070828.htm

There is much talk about the next great thing in software architectures - Software-as-a-service. Microsoft has been working on making this happen in the marketplace (Hosted Exchange is quite old; I recall trying to sell the concept to a telco and a bank some 4-5 years ago). Anyway, Microsoft probably has a solid base of empirical data to understand how software-as-a-service will work in the marketplace. I think that this will be invaluable in white-labelling software (white-labelling is a business strategy like co-branding (retail) or code-sharing (airlines) that allows a player to extend the reach of their offerings -- HTC is aiming at mass market or small businesses who could not be bothered by installing or configuring Exchange installations)

I'm not quite sure what Microsoft's SaaS strategy is, but I would suspect they are looking to attract other players to distribute services from their Live-portfolio. Could P&C insurance vendors be mature partners? or banks? After all they have been white-labelling for some time now. And then, should Telcos focus on delivering high-quality access for these services?.. or should they aggressively go after digital content? Probably both.

Disruption appears to be more the rule than the exception.

The Digital Society is a term I came up with some time ago, with the idea of extending the "hype" of the Digital Home to other areas like school, eGovernment etc. I hope the term Digital Society does not suffer the same "hyped" fate of terms like the Digital Home or eCommerce before that. The use of the 2.0 suffix appears to go the same way, so I deliberaty will not use Society 2.0

So, what exactly is the Digital Society? The Digital Society aims to capture the essence of placing the citizen at the center of digital services --regardless of where these services come from -- entertainment companies, Government, my employer, my bank etc.

To make this concept more understandable. I propose 5 different settings or scenarios:
A) Entertainment - Music, photos, videos, films etc. Produced by me or professionally
B) Security and comfort - Managing the appliances at home, surveillance, healthcare services
C) Shopping and commerce - Banking, shopping
D) Work - Sharing documents and tools to do office work and school/college work
E) Citizenry - Utilising government services for tax, welfare etc

As mentioned earlier, the key to the concept is "user-centricity" -- where the user, based on her/his lifestyle preferences, will have different uses for the digital services. The rationale for this "user-focus" lies in the lessons learned from the PC-era.

Consider the mid 1980s, the mainstream office PC was invented, Ethernet was commercially available, client-server software architecture was gaining attention. By early 1990s we had a massive proliferation of software and the de-centralisation of IT-management. From the chaos of this proliferation, we emerged with user-centered design as a key element of software design. Today, we have muliple devices (not just the PC), Internet (not just Ethernet) and we have Service Oriented Architecture (evolved from client server). It is then, tempting to extrapolate the experiences from the PC-era and expect the emergence of "Consumer Centered Design" as a key element for creating digital services.

PS! I wonder why service providers like Telcos do not realise that, their way to segment the customer (i.e. private or corporate) blatantly ignores the fact that I am BOTH a private and a corporate customer (I am me!!).