CTF seminar with Professor Steven Alter
A Unified, Operational View of Service, Service Systems, Value Co-Creation, and Digital Transformation
Welcome to seminar with Steven Alter, Professor Emeritus, University of San Francisco. Stevens presentation explains a unified, operational perspective on service and service systems, thereby addressing an important gap in the emerging discipline of service science. That gap involves under-emphasizing operational systems that produce services, enact value creation and co-creation, and play an essential role in digital transformation.
Steven Alter will start the presentation by summarizing the work system perspective, a set of ideas that were developed to help business professionals visualize and analyze systems in their own organizations. Next he summarizes how that perspective expanded to encompass ideas related to services and service systems. An operational view of service and service systems leads to a specific way of thinking about value co-creation, resource integration, value propositions, and other ideas that are often associated with service.
Steven Alter is Professor Emeritus at the University of San Francisco. He served as vice president of a manufacturing software start-up that was acquired by Applied Materials. Upon returning to academia he wrote four editions of a major IS textbook. That effort led to research focused on developing systems analysis and design methods that business professionals could use for their own understanding and to help them collaborate more effectively with IT professionals, consultants, and vendors. The result was various versions of the “work system method (WSM),” which focuses on the business problem of creating or improving a sociotechnical work system, rather than the more limited technical challenge of creating or improving software that satisfies requirements. Most of his articles in journals and conference proceedings are related to WSM, work system theory (WST), service systems, and extensions of WST such as a theory of workarounds.
Drafts of most of his articles are available at www.stevenalter.com