Modelling collaborative services: The COSEMO model

📝 Abstract

Despite the dominance of the service sector in the last decades, there is still a need for a strong foundation on service design and innovation. Little attention has paid on service modelling, particularly in the collaboration context. Collaboration is considered as one of solutions for surviving or sustaining the business in the high competitive atmosphere. Collaborative services require various service providers working together according to agreements between them, along with service consumers, in order to co-produce services. In this paper, we address crucial issues in collaborative services such as collaboration levels, sharing data and processes due to business inter-dependencies between service stakeholders. Afterward, we propose a model for Collaborative Service Modelling, which is able to cover identified issues. We also apply our proposed model to modelling an example of healthcare services in order to illustrate the relevance of our modelling approach to the matter in hand.

💡 Analysis

Despite the dominance of the service sector in the last decades, there is still a need for a strong foundation on service design and innovation. Little attention has paid on service modelling, particularly in the collaboration context. Collaboration is considered as one of solutions for surviving or sustaining the business in the high competitive atmosphere. Collaborative services require various service providers working together according to agreements between them, along with service consumers, in order to co-produce services. In this paper, we address crucial issues in collaborative services such as collaboration levels, sharing data and processes due to business inter-dependencies between service stakeholders. Afterward, we propose a model for Collaborative Service Modelling, which is able to cover identified issues. We also apply our proposed model to modelling an example of healthcare services in order to illustrate the relevance of our modelling approach to the matter in hand.

📄 Content

MODELLING COLLABORATIVE SERVICES: The COSEMO model Thanh Thoa Pham Thi(1), Thang Le Dinh(2) (1)School of Computing, Dublin City University, Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland thoa.pham@computing.dcu.ie (2) Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, Canada Thang.Ledinh@uqtr.ca Markus Helfert (3), Michel Leonard(4) (3)School of Computing, Dublin City University, Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland markus.helfert@computing.dcu.ie (4) Department of Information Systems, University of Geneva, Switzerland Michel.Leonard@cui.unige.ch Keywords: Service modelling, collaboration, sharing data and processes, collaborative services Abstract:
Despite the dominance of the service sector in the last decades, there is still a need for a strong foundation on service design and innovation. Little attention has paid on service modelling, particularly in the collaboration context. Collaboration is considered as one of solutions for surviving or sustaining the business in the high competitive atmosphere. Collaborative services require various service providers working together according to agreements between them, along with service consumers, in order to co- produce services. In this paper, we address crucial issues in collaborative services such as collaboration levels, sharing data and processes due to business interdependencies between service stakeholders. Afterward, we propose a model for Collaborative Service Modelling – the COSEMO model, which is able to cover identified issues. We also apply our proposed model to modelling an example of healthcare services in order to illustrate the relevance of our modelling approach to the matter in hand.

1 INTRODUCTION Service science is emerged in the last few years as an interdisciplinary research domain that addresses challenges in service innovation in the service sector. The service sector includes all economic activities whose output is not a tangible product and is generally consumed at the same time, it is produced and provides added value in intangible forms (Quinn et al, 1987). Today, more and more business organizations have been seeking collaborations as one amongst solutions to sustain their business in high competitive environments. For instance, they use the supply chain model or alliance with partners. In this context, collaborative service is a kind of business collaboration in the service sector in which several business organizations work together to co-produce services.
Besides, although the dominance of service sector in recent years, the strong foundation on service design and innovation is still needed (Bitner et al, 2008).
Service modelling is undertaken in the service design and innovation. Service modelling amounts to the representation of relations between what is provided to customers, how it is provided, the technical definition of the service, and resources needed for operating the service (Vilho Raisanen, 2006). Therefore at the informational level, service modelling should describe the creation and

transformation of information between service stakeholders.
In the collaboration context, a service model should show the business aspect of the collaboration such as the participant role, sharing and exchanging of information, common processes, and the collaboration degrees.

Actually, approaches for service modelling often focus on modelling a single service (Shostack, 1982), (Kingman-Brundage, 1995), (Vilho Räisänen, 2006), (Zeithaml, 2008). There are few approaches working on inter-organizational business process collaboration such as (BPMI, 2004), (Grossman, 2008). In our point of view, they need some adaptations and extensions for modelling collaborative services.

In this paper, we point out the principles of collaborative services and then we present a new model for collaborative service modelling. We observe that, at the informational level, the collaboration degree between various business organizations is based on interdependencies of data and processes between these organisations, which are represented by the needs of sharing of data and processes. Consequently, the data consistency and correct performing of shared processes in the collaboration context should be taken into account. Our approach therefore exploits these issues.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 dues with concepts of service and collaborative services; it also discusses some related works Section 3 clarifies characteristics of collaborative services such as collaboration level and interdependency issues across organizations. Section 4 presents our proposed model for collaborative service modelling. Section 5 describes an application of our modelling approach to an example of healthcare service. Finally, we conclude our work and give some research directions in Section 6. 2 BASIC CONCEPTS AND RELATED WORKS 2.1 Services and collaborative service

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