Integrated Service Systems

Services are a whole new paradigm in how we think about, design, and develop technologies in the age of information. At its heart, this technology paradigm shift enabled by information technology is a move from the discrete one of products of the industrial age economy to integrated systems that deliver seamless functionality. Service systems are networks built around the end-user, interconnecting disparate technologies to enable seamless processes to take place.
Already people are becoming less and less tolerant of adapting themselves to siloed systems and technologies, they increasingly expect those individual systems to be integrated into seamless services that can be accessed through their mobile device, quickly and easily, through a single interface. The smart city will be a service system, likewise, the smart home will be a service system, and when the car becomes a smart car it too will become a service system. As we add a new information layer to our technology landscape and interconnect all our technologies, service systems will become the new model for technology development in the age of the Internet of Things.
In the industrial age, our technology infrastructure was about machines and the mass production of standardized products as we were required to provide a mass of people with basic physical requirements. Today, though, we are challenged to go beyond the mass production paradigm as people want more than just products, they want an actual quality of life and this is a very different thing altogether. The industrial economy delivered individual technologies and products that solved one-off aspirations of the user; a car, a house, a fridge but these things rarely interoperated to deliver overall effective outcomes. To meet people’s desire for an actual quality of life and not just more things is a much more complex challenge that requires the interconnecting and coordination of many different technologies into processes build about the end- user and this is the essence of service systems.
In this paper, we explore this new paradigm in technology development talking about how it differs from our more traditional conception of technology as a one-off physical object. We define what we mean by this term service system before looking at some of their key aspects including user-centered design, synergies, service oriented architecture and process orientated design.