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What is Service Design?

This entry is part 21 of 31 in the series Defining words

According to Wikipedia, Service design is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between service provider and customers.

www.servicedesigntools.org/ provides an open collection of tools useful in service design.

zen_c4service_logoService design tools are useful in all of the layers in the How it All Fits Together diagram.  In strategy, high level customer journey maps can illustrate the strategic intent of the target business model.  In design, the vision of the customer experience and the experience of key internal users can be illustrated in a powerful illustration that everyone can understand, criticize, and rally around.  The transformation process can be informed by the vision and requirements for the customer experience.  In production, people can understand how things are supposed to be experienced by the customer and why.  They can operate it all more in line with its intent and pass back more informed feedback, pain points, and new insights.

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What is a Customer Archetype?

This entry is part 22 of 31 in the series Defining words

Studying customers is of concern whether you are formulating a business strategy or designing a mobile app.  It helps to have a clear understanding of profiles, personas and archetypes.

Archetype is hands-down the most interesting word.  So let’s start there!  Archetype analysis studies customers at the edges instead of looking for averages within clusters as in market segment analysis.

I enjoyed a paper by Dr. Paul Riedesel at Action Marketing Research. which contrasts archetype analysis with market segmentation.

I also found the The Future Priority Report by www.scorpiopartnership.com useful.  They comment: “An archetype embodies a particular kind of behavior that is distinct and unique in some kind of way” and identify the following archetypes:

  • Benefit valuers
  • Wealth builders
  • Status enhancers
  • Convenience seekers.

The advantage of market segment analysis is that it finds segments based upon the data.  They plot customers as dots on a chart based upon attributes, find clusters of dots, and draw circles around them.  You guessed it, each circle becomes a segment.

As far as I can tell, people just make up archetypes.  Customer attributes are then matched to the archetypes based upon data.  The more the customers match an archetype, the more useful the archetype framework is.  If the customer set falls well into the archetype framework then the individual archetypes can be studied and the results applied to the customers.

My own interest in archetypes stems from my own behavior which I have observed semi-consciously.  I get in the middle of something and I get caught up with it. I become a different person for a time.  It becomes a temporary obsession until “the job” is more-less completed.  These extreme behaviors map to archetypes which are associated with key jobs that customers need to get done.  By “key jobs” I mean any activity that is important enough and complex enough to become obsessed with and need help with.  I am interested in the archetypes as well as the jobs that are important in the banking industry.  These would include:  new worker, new career holder, family oriented, investor, traveler, expat, homeowner, business owner, retiree, shopper (home, auto, other), and hobbyist.  If you can think of some more, then please comment on this post!

What are Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants?

This entry is part 23 of 31 in the series Defining words

There are digital natives and digital immigrants.  Digital natives, having grown up around computers and mobile phones, have radically different needs, wants and expectations.

The market trend is that digital immigrants are naturally being replaced by digital natives.

The market force is that companies must (at this time) address the needs of both types of customers.

See Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants By Marc Prensky.

What is technology-driven change?

This entry is part 24 of 31 in the series Defining words

Defining this one for myself. No references yet — just my opinion.

I define “change” as the effect of trends on me.  OK, I give some thought to you also.  But it has to at least be someone in the real world.

Technology-driven change would be a technology trend driving other trends such as: techTrend–>indTrend–>mktTrend.

An example is mobile apps. The technology appeared before any apparent market demand. Companies saw the potential for competitive advantage through mobile apps, and the market accepted them.
The tell-tale sign is the “this is cool now what do we do with it” phase. I see it in the internet of things now.

One implication of this change is market-driven change, where market expectations for mobile apps drove companies in other industries to provide them in an unsustainable way, and then look for new technologies to make it sustainable such as mobile platforms and ultimately cloud computing. So mktTrend–>indTrend–>techTrend.  Change causes change and the changes ripple on and on.

I suppose there is also industry-led change. An example of this is mass genome mapping where companies smell profits and develop the needed technology on the hope that the market will accept it.

So who cares?   Why the new words?  I don’t see these as words–I see them as data structures.   I am a software guy.   I want to model these concepts so I can talk about them efficiently and possibly automate the model to do simulations.   Someday.

What is a Potential Trend?

This entry is part 26 of 31 in the series Defining words

A potential trend is one of those things that I hear about every day in the news but don’t actually see any evidence of yet.  If it is a potential industry-led change such as mobile wallets then the industry is spending loads of money on it but so far zero revenue. If it is a potential market-led change such as mass genome mapping then people are waiting for it but it has so far not materialized–most likely because the technology is not quite there yet.  If it is a technology-led change such as the internet of things then everyone is predicting that it will happen because it is possible but so far it has not.

You should do two things:

  1. Put it on your watch list.  Scan the news to see if it is crossing the threshold from a potential trend to something that is causing change.
  2. Establish pivot points in your strategy.  See my post The Bank Finds You.  See the pivot points in the decision tree?  These are actions that you can take now that will pay off even if the potential trend never actually materializes (or if you decide not to act) because they are relevant to more than one trend (or decision).

What are Cloud Standards?

This entry is part 27 of 31 in the series Defining words

Cloud Standards are open standards that allow interoperability for cloud computing.  Standards give cloud computing consumers the ability to compose services across clouds and more choice about which cloud they deploy their applications to and not to be locked in.

The latter ideas about choice and freedom make standards of strategic concern.  This improves the position of cloud consumers vis-à-vis cloud suppliers.

The Openstack alliance provides open standards for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).  IaaS standards would be most important to the IT operations organizations and primarily includes Compute-as-a-Service, Storage-as-a-Service and Network-as-a-Service.

Cloud Foundry provides open standards for Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).  PaaS standards would be most important to software developers and includes Lifecycle Management Services, Middleware application deployment and management, and Cloud Integration Services.

OASIS provides open standards for interoperability of applications in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Business-Process-as-a-Service (BPaaS).  Application interoperability standards are most important to user groups (and the IT groups that support them).  See Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA).

A good read about Openstack and OASIS is Eric Knorr’s  What IBM’s embrace of OpenStack really means in InfoWorld (March 2013).

IBM organizes its view on cloud computing and related open standards and provides guidance on how to build cloud solutions in its Cloud Computing Reference Architecture (CCRA).  For Cloud Service Providers, in addition to basic Cloud Services, the CCRA adds a Common Cloud Management Platform (CCMP) which includes Operational Support Services (OSS) and Business Support Services (BSS).

Standards will also cover Cloud Consumer Services such as Cloud Service Integration tools, as well as Service Creation Tools for Cloud Service Creators.

 

What is VisaNet?

This entry is part 28 of 31 in the series Defining words

In the interview with Jim McCarthy (Global Head of Strategic Partnership and Innovation at Visa) and Ginni Rometty (IBM Chairman, President and CEO) they discuss Visa in particular and payment processing companies in general.

The Visa brand is shown on about 2 billion cards.  Visa’s clients include about 14 thousand banks, who issue cards.  Visa’s traditional business model is to provide the network (VisaNet) to connect these client banks to about 36 million merchants who take payments using cards via a point of sale (POS) terminal.  Visa did about 92 billion transactions over VisaNet in 2013, which is about 20% of consumer transactions by value.  Visa transmits the payment information to the bank in real-time and returns an authorization (payment guarantee) back to the merchant.  Visa also provides a risk score and risk condition code with each transaction in real-time.  The performance, scalability, security and reliability of VisaNet is key to the value proposition.  Visa has had zero down time during busy holiday seasons over the past 20 years.

Visa infrastructure is centered around IBM mainframes as it has been for some 50 years.  They connect to banks with “Base I/II” which stands for Bank of America System Engineering (I’ve also heard the “E” once referred to “Experiment”).

Visa is watching changes in the industry which seek to enhance the user experience of making payments for consumers and companies by moving the payment from a card to a mobile device (there are about 7 billion mobile phones in existence).  As payments shift from cards to phones the Visa business model changes.  Visa needs to extend their network to include 3rd parties who are shaping these consumer/merchant interactions of the future.  Square is one such partner in the Visa ecosystem.

An example of fully digital payments is making a payment on iTunes.  These payments also involve a card and Apple has about 800 million cards on file.  Another example of digital payments using a credit card is Uber whose mobile apps connect passengers with drivers of vehicles for hire and ride-sharing services.

What is User Context?

This entry is part 29 of 31 in the series Defining words

When designing a mobile app we want to look for ways to account for the user’s context.  This includes the person’s identity and location, travel speed, active apps, the weather, the task are they performing, gestures, sensor inputs, asleep or awake, etc.

What are IBM CCRA and CCMP?

This entry is part 30 of 31 in the series Defining words

The IBM Cloud Computing Reference Architecture (CCRA) and Common Cloud Management Platform (CCMP) are useful to understanding the IBM Private Modular Cloud (CMP).

CCMP includes Operational Support Systems (OSS) and Business Support Systems (BSS).

At the highest level the IBM point of view can be summarized as follows:

CCRA summary

For an expanded view of the CCRA and CCMP IBM provides the following diagram.

CCRA CCMP RA