Enhancing service system design: An entity interaction pattern approach

Abstract

The notion of system thinking and the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing Group (IMP)'s findings have been emphasizing that "interaction is the basis analysis unit" of service systems or enterprises. Service system design is an attempt to change the outcome of a service ecosystem and make it more innovative in terms of figuring out not only who those entities are and what their outcomes are, but more importantly how they interact to realize their service values. The design of a service system could accordingly be viewed as changes made to the interactions. In the paper, system entity interactions are classified into patterns to become more analyzable, and different patterns can serve as measurements and guidelines for enterprises to follow and use to gain higher service value. To justify the important role of interaction in the service value creating process, a particular information system is developed and evaluated to explore the benefits of using interaction patterns for enterprise users to create their service values.