Towards smart service networks: An interdisciplinary diagnostic framework

Service Networks (SNs) are open systems accommodating the co-production of new knowledge and services through organic peer-to-peer interactions. Key to broad success of SNs in practice is their ability to foster and ensure a high performance. By performance we mean the joint effort of tremendous interdisciplinary collaboration, cooperation and coordination among the network participants. However, due to the heterogeneous background of such participants (i.e., business, technical, etc.), operational gaps are likely to appear in the end-to-end service provisioning process. Especially when there are performance anomalies, the SNs lack of traceability to find out the root cause, due to the confusions in the multi-disciplinary communication of SNs participants. To deal with such a problem, we propose a novel method of diagnosing SNs performance on the basis of a systems thinking mindset. By using our diagnostics, the SNs essence and performance are identified and modeled in both static and dynamic manners. The SNs performance can be tuned and optimized with improved traceability to the involved service operations.