服务价值的若干性质初探

Service is defined as a provider-to-client co-production that creates and captures value while sharing risks. By collaborating people, resources and techniques from customers and providers together, a service system co-produces and delivers proposed values to all the participants of the service. As value holds a central position in lifecycle of services, it should be fully considered and aware of in full lifecycle of a service and it is very essential to be conscious of characteristics of values. This is the objective of this paper. Firstly, we make a classification on service values. Broad-sense value is produced either by transferring “things” between participants, or by improving some states of participants. Nine types of service values, including Economics Value, Product Value, Information Value, Resource Usage Value, Experience Value, Physical Value, Enjoyment Value, Social Impact Value, Knowledge and Skill Value, are roughly explained. Four means of value delivery between providers and customers are briefly discussed. However, most of current existing service model specifications (e.g., blueprint model, BPMN, SPC) emphasize particularly on service process modeling and values attract relatively little attentions among these methods. To remedy this defect, we put forward a new concept "Value Point" by which various types of values are closely connected with processcentric service models. Next, we do some preliminary discussions on characteristics of service value, including decompo- sability, composability, transitivity, transformation, and dependency. Connotation of each characteristic is elaborately discussed, followed by a set of real-world examples for illumination. Graphical representations of these characteristics are also presented to facilitate visual modeling of service values. Decomposability: implementation of one coarse-grained value is decomposed into implementation of a set of small values. Composability: multiple existing fine-grained values compose together to form a new coarse-grained value; Transitivity: a value is transferred from one participant to another without changing its modality; Transformation: one type of value is transformed into another type. Dependency: improvement on one value leads to improvement or deterioration of another value to a specific degree. Afterwards, based on these value characteristics, we briefly introduced a Value-Aware Service Engineering and Methodology (VASEM). Besides functional and performance transformation from initial requirements to final service systems, VASME emphasizes particularly on being aware of values in full lifecycle of a service, including value expression, value keeping, value adding, value realizing, value optimizing, and so on, based on above discussed characteristics of values. Result of this paper will provide some conducts to the research on service eco-system modeling, service engineering and methodology. It helps define objective of value delivery of a service system (i.e., value proposition), provide decision-making evidences to service modeling, support value-driven model transformation, and facilitate value-oriented service evaluation and optimization.