Towards Smart Service Networks: An Interdisciplinary Service Assessment Metrics

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.), different interpretations of the shared terminology are likely to happen. Thus, confusion may appear in the multi-disciplinary communication of SNs participants which in turn may lead to performance anomalies. To deal with such a problem, we propose a novel framework of bi-dimensional (business vs technical) performance metric indicators built on the basis of a systems thinking mindset. By using our framework, a holistic picture of the multiple dimensions and structure of SNs is provided, so that the interdisciplinary service participants have a correct understanding of the service scope and required resources in operation. Moreover, and most importantly, it provides a way to examine the performance traceability of the services within a SN.