Information Systems
service design

Yves Pigneur

Fall 2010
Monday 8:00 - 12:00
Room 351 (Amphimax)
Moodle platform (moodle)

NEWS:

>>> Welcome in the course!

COURSE DESCRIPTION

The importance of the service economy is widely recognized. New information technology, specially Internet, the social networks and web 2.0, have redefined the ways of conducting business, providing new e-services, new customer experiences, new work practices, and new business models competing in the global market place. This course provides the participants with an understanding of service design, mainly online-service design.
The course integrates principles suggested by the design thinking, applied to business service design. The course introduces concepts, frameworks, and tools for designing new “front stage” services, “back stage” processes, and business models. Learning will be accomplished through lectures, research, case studies, and group co-design sessions.

>>> PDF version of this syllabus (PDF)

COURSE OBJECTIVES

Upon completion this course, the participants will have a general understanding of the current state and trends in service design, and be aware of design processes and tools (scenario, storytelling, task analysis, hand-sketching, brainstorming and ideation, mind mapping, process modeling, cognitive walkthrough, and others). 

More specifically, the participants will be able to use theses design techniques for 

• designing services,
• re-engineering business processes, and
• co-creating business models for innovation.
  

COURSE MATERIALS

Course materials are provided on the web site (web) and the Moodle platform (moodle). Weekly reading materials will acquaint the participants with the topic to be covered in the upcoming class. Students are required to read them for the course. The assigned reading list is provided in the "Course Schedule" section of this syllabus.

Recommended text:

Moritz, S. (2005) Service Design - Practical access to an evolving field. lulu.com: 245 p.

A. Osterwalder and Y. Pigneur. Business model generation. A handbook for visionaries, game changers & challengers. Wiley, 2010

COURSE REQUIREMENTS

Class preparation, attendance and participation are vital to a productive and stimulating learning environment. Allow ample time to read and reflect on the assigned readings prior the class period. Further details on the objectives, contents, and the report structure will be presented during the course.

Abstracts

All the groups are requested to prepare an abstract, comments and questions on the assigned papers (at least 3 questions per paper), which have to be posted on the group web site (Moodle) no later than 6pm the day before the next class session.

Mini-projects

Student will conduct three group mini-projects for designing
(1) an online service,
(2) a business process, and
(2) a business model, with one of its processes.
The deliverables have to be uploaded on the group web site (Moodle) on the due dates.

The group  project will produce the three following sets of deliverables:

First mini-project - Online service (due October 23)

In this first mini-pro ject, your objective is to design an online service, with the concept, some scenarios, the task analysis, a use case, a prototype, and the usability criterion, according the following structure:

Cover (title, authors, date, ...)

Table of contents
Project overview (what)
Method overview (how)

Initial service concept and scenarios
Task analysis and use case modeling
Service prototyping and hand-sketching
Service quality/usability and cognitive walkthrough

Synthesis

Second mini-project - Business process (due November 20)

In this mini-pro ject, your main goal is twofold: (a) designing a business porcess corresponding to some documents, policies and regulations, and (b) defining the performance key indicators for managing the performances of the designed process.

Further details on the objectives, contents, and the report structure will be presented during the course.

Third mini-project - Business model (due December 18)

In this mini-pro ject, your main goal is twofold: (a) presenting the business model of a company, with the financial aspects , the value proposition and customer targets, the value configuration and partners, and the main capabilities, completed with an analysis of the business model, and (b) assessing its strengths and weaknesses.

Further details on the objectives, contents, and the report structure will be presented during the course.

Final exam

Finally, there will be a three-hour written closed-book exam, which will consist of questions, essays, and exercices.

For grading purpose, activities will be issued based on the following scheme:

• 20% for the class participation, abstracts, and mini-projects
• 80% for the final exam.
  

COURSE SCHEDULE

Business service

The first part presents the “front stage” view of services, and explores techniques for designing services, analyzing the customer tasks, defining use cases and scenarios, prototyping e-services, and defining service quality.

Business process

The second part deals with the “back stage”, and presents tools and models for re-engineering business processes and taking care of service productivity.

Business model

The third part illustrates and examines the co-design of business models for improving innovation. This part also deals with service uncertainty and scenario planning.

a last session ...

DATE	TOPIC	READING
Dec. 19	Business model beyond profit	[Yunus et al., 2010]

CLASS POLICIES

Classroom participation

Students are expected to attend all classes and group meetings; class participation grades will be significantly reduced for absences. Individual contributions to class sessions are very important and will be evaluated for the course grade.

Group project

Collaboration within groups is encouraged for project work. However individual contribution in the project has to be specified for each member.

Plagiarism

Copying work form the Internet or other sources without reference or acknowledgement is considered plagiarism and subject to disciplinary action, as enforced by the University of Lausanne.

Language

The course is given in French but the course material is in English. In addition, English-speaking students can ask their questions, and write exam and project paper in English.

REFERENCES

[Bitner et al., 2008] Bitner, M., Ostrom, A., and Morgan, F. (2008). Service blueprinting: A practical technique for service innovation. California Management Review, 50(3):66–94.

[Boland et al., 2008] Boland, R., Collopy, F., Lyytinen, K., and Yoo, Y. (2008). Managing as designing: Lessons for organization leaders from the design practice of frank o. gehry. Design Issues, 24(1):10–
25.

[Chesbrough, 2007] Chesbrough, H. (2007). Why companies should have open business models. MIT Sloan Management Review, Winter:22–28.

[Demil et al., 2010] Demil, B., X. Lecocq, X (2010) Business Model Evolution: In Search of Dynamic Consistency. Long Range Planning, 43:227-246.

[Goodwin et al., 2009] K. Goodwin, Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services. Wiley, 2009

[Han et al., 2009] K. Han, K., Kang, J. Song, M. (2009) Two-stage process analysis using the process-based performance measurement framework and business process simulation, Expert Systems with Applications, 36:7080–7086.

[Kim and Mauborgne, 2002] Kim, C. and Mauborgne, R. (2002). Charting your company’s future. Harvard Business Review, 80(6):5–11.

[Lim et al., 2008] Lim, Y., Stolterman, E., and Tenenberg, J. (2008). The anatomy of prototypes: Prototypes as filters, prototypes as manifestations of design ideas. ACM Trans. on Computer-Human Interaction, 15(2):7–27.

[Moritz, 2005] Moritz, S. (2005). Service Design - Practical access to an evolving field. lulu.com. 

[Osterwalder and Pigneur, 2010] Osterwalder, A. and Pigneur, Y. (2010) Business model generation. A handbook for visionaries, game changers & challengers. Wiley.

[Phalp et al., 2007] Phalp, K., Vincent, J., and Cox, K. (2007). Assessing the quality of use case descriptions. Software Quality Journal, 15:69–97.

[Vergidis et al., 2008] Vergidis, K., Turner, C., and Tiwari, A. (2008). Business process perspectives: Theoretical developments vs. real-world practice. Int. J. Production Economics, 114:91–104.

[Rasmussen, 2005] Rasmussen, L. (2005) The narrative aspect of scenario building - How story telling may give people a memory of the future. AI & society, 19:229-249. 

[Yunus et al., 2010] Yunus, M., Moingeon, B., and Lehmann-Ortega, L. (2010) Building Social Business Models: Lessons from the Grameen Experience, Long Range Planning, 43:308-325.

The students can access the BCU digital library (codul), for consulting many useful databases (ABI/Inform, Business Source Premier, ScienceDirect, Blackwell, Ingenta, Kluwer, JSTOR, ...).