Taking an architectural view of services
I’m 18 months into my research at Glamorgan Business School, and at last have reached the stage where I am doing real stuff, and collecting real feedback and data. These case studies are being conducted at two different government departments, and I’ve plans for one or two more during this year.
I’ve developed an approach to evaluating service designs, using a service quality model, based on experience and models drawn from the software architecture community. One feature of this work has been to give all evaluations a set of stakeholder perspectives. This seems to be opening up a host of research opportunities far beyond the scope of my project.
One of my case studies involves developing an improved public service, for which we have described 21 scenarios and identified 28 distinct stakeholders (which we have clustered into 12 groups). Looking at each scenario from the perspective of each stakeholder group has produced a very rich and varied picture of the service, which can be viewed through the lens of a common service quality model. This is more like a by-product of my method than an intended consequence, but the use of a common stable model opens up the possibility of benchmarking and classifying stakeholders according to their profile.
At the top level, the model breaks service quality into six characteristics: Functionality, Reliability, Usability, Efficiency, Maintainability, Adaptability. We are now building profiles for these case study projects of different stakeholder groups – which ones care most about Efficiency, which ones are focused on Usability. With enough data, I am sure we would find repeated patterns – no prizes for guessing what the finance department are most interested in.
Will these vary by industry? By type of service? If the patterns are consistently repeated, can we use them to develop service design patterns, driving the quality of service design up, and the cost down?
I’ll be discussing these themes in my presentation at the Enterprise Architecture Conference Europe 2010 on 18th June.
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