Cosent Blog

A Systems approach to Service Design

The customer experience of any service results not only from the direct interactions between that customer and the service front-end, but also (and more so) from the interactions between and within the various back-end components performing the service, that are hidden from view from a customer perspective.

Executing a customer service request across a complex backend assembly in a seamless way, is only possible if all the component services involved have been designed from a systems perspective.

A consistent conceptual model encoding that systems perspective, should be exposed to help clients learn to navigate the service interface, and to understand and respond to any breakdown in the service choreography.

Expressive Service Blueprinting

Service Blueprinting is a diagramming technique that can be used to model service interactions as a system.

Expressive Service Blueprinting extends that method by also modeling the emotional state of the customer consuming the service, throughout the interaction with the service contact points.

Cosent has collaborated with the Köln International School of Design to apply this technique in a training programme for Siemens Energy services, as part of a Service Science Factory project I've blogged about before.

Encoding the Expressive Service Blueprint into a simulation environment that is played as a learning game, provides a shared visual model to all actors involved in service provisioning. Playing the simulation game visually demonstrates how actions traverse a full service systems model and affect client experiences, with the client expressing "unhappy", "neutral" and "happy" emotions.

This demonstrates how Service Blueprinting is not only useful as an analytical tool in (re)designing services, but can also be used to structure visual interfaces in ways that help participants in service choreographies, to better understand their role and the impact of their actions on the resulting customer experience.

Condensing complex service systems into a consistent model and language that can be explained and exposed to customers, transforms those customers from passive victims of torturing experiences, into active participants in co-creating solutions.

Even if nothing very much were to change materially, the switch from a passive to an active psychology will produce a vastly better experience for your customers. But of course the kick is, that once you start empowering your customers this way, it will become inevitable that you'll start learning to do things better and faster. And you can be pretty sure you'll have more fun, too, as your customers get happier.

A cultural upgrade

Organizations are facing tremendous external pressures to become more adaptable and agile. While these forces are driven by technological innovation, they have transcended the technology field and have become strategic drivers by themselves.

On top of that, people working in organizations are adapting to, and growing up in, this innovative media environment and carry changing expectations about the very essence of how work processes should be structured, with them on their daily commute.

Regarding social media as just a toolset to be adopted, misses the point. Yes you need to adopt the toolset, but not because it stops there: you need to adopt the social media mindset that is encoded into those tools.

In cyberpunk terms: this is not just software, it's a wetware upgrade. The social web changes how people think, and it enables organizations to change the fabric of their value-added processes from static and linear to flexible and networked.

Opening session

The opening session consisted mostly of presentations by EU politicians. I'm not going to bore you with summaries of those. You can read the full transcripts in the conference proceedings. The opening speech by Neelie Smit-Kroes was certainly interesting.

Some quotes from this session:

Catherine Trautmann MEP:

"The Internet by itself is a grand societal challenge."

Anna-Maria Darmanin MEP:

"The new generation was never so well-prepared, never so disappointed"

Looking at the future of our societies

The second session was by far the most interesting, showcasing a range of foresight (futures) research studies.

Marc Luyckx Ghisi, (former member of the "Foresight Studies Unit" of European Commission's President):

"The deep motor of the change is that all citizen feel that if we continue with our actual economic logic, we are in danger of collective suicide."

He cited Drucker:

"That knowledge has become the resource, rather than a resource, is what makes our society « post-capitalist ». This fact changes – fundamentally – the structure of society. It creates new social and economic dynamic. It creates new politics."

Carlo Sessa (President of ISIS, Italy, coordinator of the PASHMINA project and member of the Global Europe 2030-2050 expert group), summarized the Pashmina Project. They've developed four scenarios against two axes: 1. Do it fast / Do it slow 2. Do it alone / Do it together

Cheryl Hicks (UNEP/Wuppertal Institute Collaborating Centre on Sustainable Consumption and Production, Project Director, SPREAD Sustainable Lifestyles 2050 project) outlined the SPREAD Sustainable Lifestyles 2050 project: Developing a Vision & Action Roadmap for Sustainable Lifestyles.

"No-one really knows what a sustainable lifestyle means."

She highlighted collaborative consumption and sustainability scoring of products.

Dirk Johann (Researcher, Austrian Institute of Technology, European Foresight Platform) introduced the European Foresight Platform and referenced Mapping Foresight, a meta-study indexing a large number of foresight studies performed across Europe.

Philippe Quéau (Representative of UNESCO to the Maghreb) criticized the policy preference for "ultrafast networks" as harking back to the outdated "super information highway" metaphor.

He distinguishes:

The "Digital paradigm"

instrumental, technological impact

The "Information paradigm"

environmental, wide societal impact

The "Knowledge paradigm"

mental, deep impact on civilization

and also a new convergence paradigm:

The "BANG paradigm"

Bits, Atoms, Neurons, Genes

Guo Liang (Deputy Director, Center for Social Development, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) shook the (European) audience by applying Metcalfe's law to China. Already Asia is the continent with most Internet users, double that of Europe. Chinese usage patterns are distinct from Western patterns: instant messaging instead of email, a predominance of micro-blogs, work/study focus in internet use. China is atypical: it's citizens feel that they can influence their government via the Internet. But also:

"1/3 of Internet users in China use the Internet only to play games. For them, it's nothing more than a game machine."

Looking at the future of the internet

The next presentations were technology-driven, which was a bit of a jar after the confronting societal futures presentations that went before - it's clear that a narrow tech-only focus won't solve our problems.

"One day we should get a presentation how the marvelous technology projects address the societal challenges" @HeikkiHuomo

Willem Jonker

(CEO of the EIT ICT Lab)

Luis Rodriguez-Rosello

(Head of the Future Networks Unit, European Commission's DG Infso)

Petra Turkama

(Director CKIR, Aalto University, Coordinator of the FIppp Concord project)

The Future Internet Public-Private Partnership is a huge academic/industrial consortium funded by the EU.

"I would have like P Turkama explain how the FIppp initiative can evolve towards a FIpppp one (adding people)... @_PARADISO

"A big-budget bureaucratic approach to innovation cannot simulate or stimulate enterpreneurial spirit" @GuidoStevens

Lynn St Amour (President & CEO, The Internet Society) shifted the focus to open standards and user centricity.

"Individuals have created almost all on the internet that we value today"

Ashok Jhunjhunwala (Professor, Head of department, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India) delivered a truly outstanding presentation: Future of the Internet: a view from the emerging world. This tied together all the themes we had seen: societal challenges, global power shift towards Asia, the crucial role of technology.

"THIS is IT... Asia centric internet is emerging... they see it as opportunity and ARE moving." @HeikkiHuomo

Internet and societies: call to action

Ruben Nelson, Executive Director, Foresight Canada

"There isn't a politician in the world that will speak honestly to our children about the future."

"As a society, many people have given up on becoming more deeply human"

"This guy does not talk about knowledge but extracts it to WISDOM" @HeikkiHuomo

Juan Carlos de Martin, Professor, Politecnico di Torino, Director of the NEXA Center for Internet and Society

Margot Dor, Head of strategic projects, ETSI

Ward Hanson, Policy Forum Director and Fellow, Stanford Institute for Policy Research Center

"E-commerce concentration is happening faster than preferential attachment models can explain."

Jim Williams, Director, International Networking, Indiana University, co-chair, GENI Operations

Roger Torrenti, CEO Sigma Orionis, PARADISO project coordinator

Email Analysis To The Rescue

We also had one other data source though. We had requested access to emails exchanged around a typical project, in order to get a better grip on the subject matter. One guy in our team performed a content analysis of those emails; this more or less confirmed what we already knew about the Siemens work flows.

Far more interesting though, were the results that emerged from performing a social network analysis on that email conversation. If you click to enlarge, you can see the picture.

This shows a social map where each person is represented by a colored circle. Each email communication is shown as an arrow from the sender to the recipient (multiple arrows in case of multiple recipients). So far, so good. Just by comparing the social network graph with the flow chart I made, I could see the similarities and guess who performed which role.

But then I noticed some strange patterns and adjusted my software to color-code people according to the ratio of incoming versus outgoing emails, resulting in the picture you're seeing. Blue circles represent people who sent emails, but never got a reply. Red circles are people who received emails, but never bothered to answer. Green and yellow have balanced inbound/outbound communications.

Evidence-based management

What this tells you, is that there's a lot of dead-end messaging going on. Too much blue and certainly too much red. A follow-up interview revealed that this was correct; sometimes people reply to an email by phone. Sometimes they just don't reply at all.

Much more importantly though, and this was immediately picked up by the client: actual communications processes are much more messy than you'd think, if you trusted the neat flowcharts in your document management system.

Social networking analytics open up a new window on the actual processes going on in an organization, enabling an evidence-based approach to optimizing work flows and communication processes.

Generic knowledge strategy

Limited resources and cultural factors that predispose organizations to one learning style over the others, create a dynamic from which typical configurations of learning styles emerge.

We may distinguish between four generic knowledge strategies:

Innovator

Innovators are able to integrate learning across all the dimensions mentioned above, creating synergies between the various types of learning. Innovators are also the fastest learners.

Loner

Loners spend much resources on R&D with poor results. They are isolated and slow learners, with typically a over-narrow knowledge base.

Exploiter

Exploiters spend least on R&D and benefit from external learning that incrementally expands a broad (but shallow) knowledge base.

Explorer

Explorers attain very high levels of radicalness, with a balanced approach across all the learning approaches, while spending less on R&D than Innovators.

Aligning operational knowledge strategies

A recent publication integrates the four generic knowledge strategies outlined above, with a portfolio approach to four operational knowledge strategies:

Leveraging

A leveraging strategy prioritizes internal transfer of existing knowledge.

Appropriating

An appropriating strategy prioritizes external learning to widen the knowledge base.

Expanding

An expansion strategy prioritizes the creation of new knowledge that adds to the existing knowledge base.

Probing

A probing strategy attempts to create a new knowledge capability from scratch.

Benchmarking your knowledge strategy

I've created a computer model that incorporates the complex relationships between learning style trade-offs, generic knowledge strategies and operational knowledge strategies.

Running this model allows us to investigate some interesting questions:

• What is your long-term, or 'grand', knowledge strategy?
• Are your operational knowledge activities consistent with this long-term focus?

To see how the model helps answering these questions, let's investigate how it works for Example Corp, a fictitous organization.

First we define a knowledge strategy "fingerprint" of Example Corp, consisting of scores (low/medium/high) for various learning dimensions, as follows: internal (medium), external (high), radical (high), transfer (high), creation (medium), speed (high), scope (high), focus (medium).

Feeding the stategic fingerprint into the computer model, gives us the alignment of Example Corp's strategy with four generic strategy types.

Example Corp turns out to fall between an Innovator and an Explorer. That's good news, both types are high performers when it comes to knowledge creation. You may want to step back and think a bit whether the competitive dynamics in your industry are strong enough to warrant an aggressive knowledge strategy, and if so, what it is that limits your ability to pursue an all-out Innovator strategy.

More interestingly, the model allows us to compare the alignment of our operational knowledge strategy implementation with the idealized 'grand' knowledge strategies of Innovator and Explorer.

As it turns out, Example Corp's alignment for the operational balance between Probing, Expanding and Leveraging is close to the expected scores, for both the Innovator and the Explorer grand strategy types. The interesting outlier is the Appropriating operational strategy, which appears to be overweighted when compared with the Innovator ideal type, and also when compared with the Explorer ideal type.

Now, there's nothing prescriptive about this model. Being heavily invested in Appropriation may be a valid operational strategy. Highlighting this aspect of your knowledge strategy operationalization does, however, raise the question: why are you heaviliy invested in Appropriation?

As it turns out, Example Corp is entering a new product market and the high weight for Appropriation reflects a conscious decision to widen the knowledge base fast, by absorbing external knowledge. As the new product line becomes established, Example Corp will want to make sure that the operational knowledge strategy portfolio becomes more balanced and increasingly incorporates other modes of strengthening the knowledge base.

Benchmarking knowledge activity performance on a range of carefully chosen indicators, makes visible the chosen long-term knowledge strategy, and allows for evaluation and tuning of the portfolio of operational knowledge strategies.

Paper Prototyping Protocol

You prepare a session, by creating simple wire frame drawings of the various screens a user will encounter during the interaction.

The session protocol is as follows:

• A facilitator welcomes the test user, explains the paper prototyping procedure, and gives the user a task she should perform in the application, for example finding a reference document in a web site. The facilitator asks the user to "think out loud" while performing the task.
• The role of the computer is played by a member of the design team. The computer "displays" a screen by putting the right wire frame drawing in front of the test user (see illustration). The computer does not speak, and this is very important.
• The user interacts with the paper prototype by using a pencil. Pointing and tapping the pencil is the same as clicking a mouse. Using the pencil to write text into input fields is the equivalent of using the keyboard.
• The computer responds to the user's input by pasting scroll-down menus onto the wire frame, or "refreshing" the screen by replacing the displayed wire frame.

The user then interacts with the new wire frame display, the computer responds, and the interaction continues until either the task is performed or the user gives up.

This is a simple protocol, but to employ it successfully it's essential to stick to one crucial rule: no conversation. The user should "think out loud" but not pose any questions, and the computer performs his role silently. This constraint forces all interaction to take place as either simulated mouse/keyboard inputs or simulated screen refresh outputs. Not enforcing this constraint quickly degrades the validity of the outcomes of a testing session, and will also make it impossible to compare different test users performing the same task.

You can either videotape sessions, or have an observer take notes. You can easily see where a test user stumbled or made a wrong choice; the "thinking out loud" of the user at that point will provide you with valuable insights on users' thought processes and will enable you to come up with design improvements that remove the bottlenecks.

Agile Design in Practice

Selecting the right test users is important. They should be as close as possible to the actual target user demographic. You should be especially wary of test users that possess 'insider knowledge' skewing the test results. That said, any testing is better than no testing. Even testing with a handful of insider users will provide valuable insights that enable you to improve the design.

We've employed paper prototyping successfully to evaluate complex web designs. The test sessions identified some areas of confusion, which could be improved by for example providing more visual separation between similar elements.

More importantly, the paper prototyping provided hard evidence we could use in the "battle of the home page". In a big organization, everybody wants their pet project to have a prominent deep link on the home page. The paper prototyping outcomes clearly demonstrated that this would result in a overly complex home page, very confusing to users. Proving that the über-portal design variant was not a valid option, opened up the way for a different and much more elegant approach to designing the home page.

The value of paper prototyping results from two interrelated characteristics: it's cheap to do, and you can do it early in a project. You don't have to wait until a complete high-fidelity design is finished, before testing your design. By pulling the design testing forward, you can avoid mistakes down the line. The earlier you correct course, the cheaper it is to do so.

Producing basic wire frames is relatively cheap and allows you to de-risk major assumptions by testing them in a simulated deployment situation. You can then incorporate the outcomes in the high-fidelity design phase, and run another paper prototyping test session on the high-fidelity designs before committing to the actual software implementation, which is both the most expensive phase in itself, and also the stage where making changes to the design becomes very costly.

Eliciting end user feedback early in the design cycle allows you to test assumptions, remove errors, incorporate improvement suggestions, and prioritize the feature set. Paper prototyping provides an evidence-based process to minimize redesign costs and maximize the quality of human-computer interaction designs.

Would you like to share your experiences with paper prototyping? Your feedback is appreciated!

Social Capital

As I argued elsewhere, the new economy is centered on non-material values like knowledge, information, trust and sustainability. The crucial point is, that such non-material values grow when shared. It's not a zero-sum world anymore. If I eat your bread, you can't have any. But if I adopt your idea, we have both found an ally. The result of this transition is a massive renaissance of the commons, the pool of shared resources available to all. Sharing intellectual resources has become the new engine of value creation.

Our established currencies, and the zero-sum paradigm encoded into their operations, are becoming increasingly unreliable as tools to support collaboration and to transmit and store value. Social capital is becoming more important than physical assets. Virtual currencies, of which Facebook credits are an example, provide new conduits for value sharing and enable experiments in sustainable community economics.

All currencies, whether virtual or real, fundamentally express trust. The Dollar and Euro are called fiat money (translation: trust money) for a reason: those bills are worthless pieces of paper unless everybody trusts that they can be exchanged for real goods and services. Credit is closely related to trust and virtual currencies need credit providers just like real currencies need banks. Which begs the question: since excessive and unregulated credit expansion, especially in unregulated shadow banking systems, caused the economic near-meltdown of 2008, how should we prevent such crises from occurring in new virtual currency systems?

What are your thoughts on virtual currencies and the future of Facebook? Your feedback is appreciated!

Inspect, Blueprint, Construct

The challenge as defined by Siemens was, to come up with innovative approaches to improve customer satisfaction for their compressor service business unit, without changing business processes or the structure of the organization.

The Service Science Factory uses a 8-week project format, in which a multidisciplinary team composed of academics, designers and business professionals, works through 3 stages called inspect, blueprint and construct. Those of you with an organizational learning background, will recognize the similarities with Theory U.

Inspect

In the inspect phase, the team conducted many interviews with Siemens customers and employees. From these, we extracted typical actors, called personas which we later used in the game design.

Blueprint

Our analysis enabled us to model a blueprint of the communications flows between customers and various departments within Siemens. We validated this blueprint by performing a social network analysis on some typical email conversations, which highlights how reality typically is more messy than your model.

Construct

In the construction phase, we elaborated upon the blueprint to construct a game engine that simulates the communication dynamics. The game engine identifies all possible game play states and the choices that players can make, in terms of performing actions and communicating optimally. The game design team then visualized an example game play sequence and produced the video above, to explain the game concept.

Siemens Energy representatives are happy with the outcomes of this Service Science Factory project. A report documenting the game design, World Cafe workshop concept and service charter recommendations can be used, to guide implementation and improve communications and customer satisfaction.

This result was made possible by a unique multidisciplinary team of people who were brought together specifically for this project by the Service Science Factory. A great example of design thinking in action, to produce an innovative solution for an organizational learning problem.

What are your thoughts on using serious gaming as a vehicle for organizational learning? Your feedback is appreciated!

Can we have an extra button please?

What can be easier, for example, than putting an extra button somewhere in a web page? Clients love to ask for extra buttons, small features here and there, hacks and gadgets.

That might be easy if the action that button performs, ties in with what the user is doing on that page. If it strengthens the user experience, and naturally extends the software functionality already there, no problem.

On the other hand, the button feature might disturb the overall user experience and be at odds with deep assumptions in your software stack. In that case, you're both degrading your brand experience, and picking a fight with a million lines of upstream software codes. The results: negative benefits, high one-time cost, increased maintenance costs and decreased flexibility for future changes.

How do you know the difference between a "good" button and a "bad" button? You don't. Unless you stop talking about buttons, and start talking about business benefits and engineering constraints.

The simplest way to do that is by embracing the famous "Five W" questions, extending them into a simple framework:

1. Why do we need this (button)?

   How does it create value and contribute to our overall mission?

2. Who needs this (button)?

   Who will be delighted by it?

3. Where does this (button) belong?

   In what context does it make sense? Which capability does it reinforce?

4. When does this (button) occur?

   Which process uses it? Which processes does it trigger?

5. What does this (button) do?

   How exactly will it work, technically?

You don't need a 3-page countersigned form to do this. Much better is to spend a few minutes discussing these questions with an inspired team.

Sequence matters. Refocus the discussion on the problem definition first (1: why), and work downward from that (2, 3, 4) to the optimal solution (5).

This replays the process the initial requester went through, probably mostly subconsciously, in defining the original button request. Reproducing this process explicitly in a team setting makes it possible to jointly investigate, and challenge, any hidden assumptions and abandoned alternatives. This produces better solutions, and improves team coordination.

The somewhat paradoxical delight of this approach is, that by refocusing attention away from implementation issues, to prioritize business value concerns, implementation becomes much easier. A solid and well-understood business proposition quite naturally leads to an elegant implementation design, with high long-term values.

Transforming a proposed quick fix into a solution you can be proud of is much harder - that usually requires reverse engineering (extracting) the implicit business case from the quick fix proposal, and then discussing alternative solutions in technology terms that conceal the true business issues at stake. It's easy to get stuck here.

Getting unstuck

In the context of evolving a web site, we can apply the "Five W" questions process to itself as follows:

1. Why do we need this process?

   To create excellent web experiences at minimal cost and maximal flexibility.

2. Who needs this process?

   Any organization that wants to maintain a long-term high-quality web presence.

3. Where does this process belong?

   In a small team with business/user representative(s), user interaction designer(s) and back-end software engineer(s): reinforcing the web capability.

4. When does this process occur?

   After initial request/idea submission, before scheduling implementation design.

5. What does this process do?

   Integrate numerous change requests into a value-driven, consistent long-term technology evolution.

Won't this slow us down?

Actually: no. Not even in the short term. Doing an ad-hoc fix now may seem fast, but it immediately impacts your development speed on other ongoing changes. You may have skimped on impact analysis, but the development team will have to integrate the impact of this change into the overall picture anyway. Better to bear this time cost up-front and generate better solutions with lower long-term disturbance.

We're used to the quick and easy way.

You can do better than that.

What do I tell colleagues who want a feature change?

"Thank you, we hadn't thought about that yet. We'll investigate this issue and prioritize it in our planned change effort. Whom should we contact if we have any questions on this?"

We already have a change review process. I hate it.

I understand. This is different. We don't need forms and voting. An hour-long (video) meeting each week to review all new change requests in context should suffice.

A week? But this is urgent! I need it tomorrow!

The only class of issues that warrants such fast turnaround is: critical bugs. Feature change requests usually improve when given the chance to mature. When everything is urgent, nothing really is. Also note that hasty changes quite often have side effects that require new changes in a vicious cycle. The "Five W" process is designed to break that cycle and reduce trashing.

How Agile is that?

Agile does not mean: anything goes, no structure. Agile development uses carefully chosen constraints (time boxed, fixed scope iterations) and seemingly counter-productive practices (test driven development, peer programming) to actually achieve high speed, high quality results. Software development is a highly complex activity. By handling the complexity load upfront, Agile development avoids "unexpected" delays and quality problems which are far more costly down the line.

Isn't this difficult?

It grows on you with some practicing. And we're in this together and can support each other! One of the main benefits of adopting this simple model, is that it provides a shared language, facilitating a team effort. It's much more fun to collaborate together in creating a kick-ass web experience, than it is to stare at the product backlog in isolation.

Did you come up with this by yourself, or what?

Yes and no. The text is mine and based on 15+ years of experience managing web technology projects. The "Five W" model is adapted from the Change Ladder model by Mick Cope. My thinking on Agile is mainly inspired by Scrum and Test Driven Development. If you don't see the problem, take a look into the abyss of IT Project Failures.

Sounds good. We'd like to improve our change process. Can you help us?

Sure, please contact me and we'll work something out.