Designing Analytics-Based Services

Exploring Design Requirements for Methodological Tool Assistance in  Service Design Teams

Abstract

Analytics-based services (ABS) apply analytical methods to data in  order to enable customers to make better decisions and solve more complex  problems. While it is widely acknowledged that ABS pave the way for new  value creation opportunities, surprisingly little is known about their systematic  design. Service design teams still struggle to create ABS solutions  systematically, i.e. to define what is to be done, how this is going to be achieved  and how decisions are taken during ABS design projects. In this research, we  report on the first iteration of our design science research project which aims to  build design knowledge on methodological tools that can support service design  teams in this particular context. We derive and evaluate four meta-requirements and four design principles – thus contributing to a more profound design knowledge base that can support researchers in developing new methodological tools in the field of ABS in the future.

Introduction

In the wake of business changes enabled by the digital transformation [1], large  amounts of data accompanied with advances in analytics technology provide  companies with novel opportunities to create meaningful value for their customers [2– 4]. Analytics-based services (ABS), a new type of services, are introduced to the  market that leverage analytical methods (‘analytics’) applied to data in order to help their customers make better decisions and solve more complex problems to ultimately  reach their goals more effectively [5, 6]. Researchers and industry experts agree that  ABS provide a promising path for companies to gain new competitive advantages [7,  8] by enabling a much deeper customer connection [9], by allowing a broader role in supporting the customer’s value creation [10], or even by opening up entirely new markets [11]. Thus, systematically realizing new ABS opportunities has received  research priority [7] and is being actively explored by companies [12].  

Service design is a formalized, multi-disciplinary approach that helps innovate  service offerings. Thus it could potentially serve as a means to guide and stimulate the  development of new ABS [13]. Surprisingly, little research has been reported to  advance service design literature in this regard and actionable insights to better  manage ABS design are still lacking [14]. As a result, service designers in practice  still struggle to develop services that appropriate the expected value from data and  analytics in novel service offerings [14, 15]. In particular, creating and refining the  service concept remains a challenge in ABS design. At the core of service design  processes, the service concept serves as a means of specifying the nature of the  service to be provided [16]. As such, it provides a detailed description of a service  idea with regard to its value creation and delivery processes [17]. Thus, a clear and  shared understanding of the service concept within service design teams, which we  refer to as service concept comprehension, is crucial in order to ensure consistent  decision making during the course of a service design project – yet, actionable insights on ABS-related service concept comprehension remain scare.  

Methodological tools assisting service design have the potential to solve this issue.  Prior research has found that creative and interdisciplinary tasks can particularly  benefit from tool-support by promoting a better comprehension through visualization,  communication, and documentation [18]. This could positively influence the  performance of service design teams during ABS-concept development in practice.  However, design knowledge which helps researchers to build tools specifically  assisting service concept comprehension is scarce. Researchers lack theoretically  sound guidance through clear principles for designing such tools in general terms. To  this end, we propose a design science research (DSR) project seeking to address this  literature gap by tackling the following research question: How to design methodological tools assisting ABS design in order to increase service concept  comprehension?  In this research, we report on the first iteration of our project and present initial  design requirements which are meant to serve researchers as a more profound design  knowledge base when building new methodological tools in the specific field of ABS  design. In the remainder of the paper, we first provide necessary foundations and  related work relevant to our research. This is followed by our research methodology  in section 3. The findings of our research are reported in section 4 and 5, structured  chronologically reaching from the design requirements derived to their instantiation  and evaluation. We then discuss our findings in section 6 before we briefly  summarize our results, acknowledge limitations, and provide an outlook on future  research in Section 7.