Analyzing Service Interaction Network Effectiveness

Service systems rely on internal interactions of service provider agents and the external interactions with customers in the design and delivery of services. Careful analysis and modeling of such interactions are essential to the design of effective service systems. This paper focuses on service interaction networks in the context of the design and delivery of complex, IT-centric services. More specifically, we develop a model of service interaction networks in service delivery and investigate some of the key structural properties of the networks that can have significant effect on the effectiveness of the service system. The validity of the proposed model and the related hypotheses are tested using data acquired from SourceForge.net which is the world's largest OSS development website.