e-Business
service design

Yves Pigneur

Fall 2008
Thursday 8:15 - 12:00
Room 237 (Internef)
Group blogs (site)

NEWS:

>>> Alex's visit on December 11;
deadline for project 2 is December 18

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 (http://www.hec.unil.ch/yp/GTI). Weekly reading materials will acquaint the participants with the topic to be covered in the upcoming class. Students are required to read all of them for the course. The assigned reading list is provided in the "Course Schedule" section of this syllabus.

Recommended text:

Boland, R. and Collopy, F. (2004). Managing as Designing. Stanford Business Books: 289 p.

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

Alex's blog (blog)

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.

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 (blog) no later than 6pm the day before a class session.

Project

Student will conduct two group mini-projects for designing
(1) a “front stage” service,  and
(2) a “back stage” business model, with one of its processes.
The deliverables have to be uploaded on the group web site (blog) on the due dates, and presented during the class at the scheduled dates.

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

First Deliverables - Service (due November 6)

In this first mini-pro ject, your ob jective 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 Deliverables - 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
• 30% for the project
• 50% 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.

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

[Alter, 2008] Alter, S. (2008). Service system fundamentals: Work system, value chain, and life cycle. IBM Systems Journal, 47(1):71–85.

[Basu and Kumar, 2002] Basu, A. and Kumar, A. (2002). Research commentary: Workflow management issues in e-business. Information Systems Research, 13(1):1–14.

[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.

[Kaplan and Norton, 2000] Kaplan, R. and Norton, D. (2000). Having trouble with your strategy? then map it. Harvard Business Review, 78(5):167–76.

[Kettinger and Lee, 1997] Kettinger, W. and Lee, C. (1997). Pragmatic perspectives on the measurement of information systems service quality. MIS Quarterly, 21(2):223–240.

[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.

[Miller and Waller, 2003] Miller, K. and Waller, G. (2003). Scenarios, real options and integrated risk management. Long Range Planning, pages 93–107.

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

[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.

The students can access the BCU digital library (http://dbserv1-bcu.unil.ch/dbbcu/cds/menu.php), for consulting many useful databases (ABI/Inform, Business Source Premier, ScienceDirect, Blackwell, Ingenta, Kluwer, JSTOR, ...).