Web-based Service Industry
From IRF 2008
[edit] Introductory topic: Web-based Service Industry
The key ingredients for success in new Web-based service endeavors stand in contrast to traditional service industries. Due to the ubiquitous nature of the Internet, the barrier to entry is extremely low and the potential reach large. As seen on the basis of software-as-a-service ventures, innovativeness of service offers, agility of technologies and advertiser-subsidized business models have conjoined to bring together service provider and consumer communities to foster new and disruptive service markets.
In Europe and the United States in particular, the precedence for wider growth of Web-based service industries can be seen through mainstream industries turning to small-to-medium enterprises for reduced total-cost-of-ownership and outsourced service provisioning. To this end, different forms of service provisioning are sought to drive innovation and efficiency in which services are repurposed and procured into new markets. In order to allow quick entry-points for partners in service supply networks, the whole spectrum of the business of intermediation needs to be supported. For example, in addition to agile mechanisms to extend pre-existing services, service aggregators need customer-relationship management to hold records of their consumers, consumption patterns and rewards. Payment engines are required for billing customers and disbursing transaction revenue to contributing partners. Master-data management addresses data consistency and synchronization for multi-sourced services. Helpdesks are needed to manage service exceptions. Service contracts provide assurance for consumers and delivery partners –and should ideally be tracked as service execute. Warehouse management and logistics play a role in settling services (e.g. for the transportation of physical goods).
Beyond present generation Web services like ordering books, map mash-ups, and booking flights, more complex business transactions from mainstream industries are anticipated for the next wave of consumable services - for example, from land search to property conveyance, from business directories to business formation, from disparate registrations to cohesive life event support (e.g. births and marriage). Complex challenges come into view when considering how these could be exposed as commoditized Web services. These are long-running and interactions with backend applications from potentially several agencies which need to be reliably mediated. Navigation of such services needs to be as seamless for consumers as linking to pages, facilitated by semantic descriptions of services and their interactions. An emerging challenge is leveraging widely procured service with devices through wide-spanning networks - the vertical integration of the Internet of Services with the Internet of Things to enable content (music, movie, maps and traffic information) commercialization for small single purpose appliances such as phones, MP3 players or PDAs.
Furthermore, business processes, not just individuals are expected to be consumers of “cloud” services. When harnessed through business processes, services such as environment sensors and decision-support streamline otherwise “out-of-band” operations like exception handling. They draw business processes out of internal stovepipes and rigid B2B interactions into “real-world” awareness and agility. In the literature this is often referred to as Event-Driven Architecture (EDA), complementing SOA [1].
These trends are expected to culminate in the upsurge of critical societal services in verticals and emerging cross-verticals targeted for consumer targeted services - such as health services (in particular in the US [2][3]) - to address the lack of consolidated information and service value in respective industries.
While the tools to develop these services have become very sophisticated [4], the innovation and creativity for the development of the services themselves do not require today’s large research and development facilities and can easily be developed in an SME environment to fit local requirements that can eventually be expanded globally through the Internet. The new service industry is unique because both established players and start-ups are able to compete on an equal footing – all storefronts on the Internet are on the same “high-street”. Speed, business savvy-ness, smart technology choices and agility are crucial to the emerging Web-based service sector, supplanting classic economic laws about productivity in the industrial world or the labor-intensive service industry world.
- What are the issues for harnessing complex business transactions from mainstream industries as commoditized Web services? Are these amenable to current software-as-a-service business models and service marketplaces?
- What are the human factors of service delivery and how could these be managed through service intermediation? For example, how could factors such as trust, criticality, exceptions or emergency in healthcare services, be brokered through third parties in geographically separate or online channels?
- Public sector and telecommunications industries provide natural hubs through which service provisioning can be consolidated and exposed through multiplicity of channels, e.g. one-stop shops. How will service hubs look like in the future so that consolidated service provisioning efforts can translate into Web-based service industries? Will they have to grow out of vertical segments? How can cross-vertical initiatives be cultivated? What are the funding instruments?
- Will the structure of Web-based service businesses, which are likely to be assembled from services provided by others on a service grid, eventually imitate the way that manufacturers avoid single source suppliers?
- While smaller efforts and building service-based software and business offerings will be accept at state of being beholden (locked-in) to the providers of the services, will the larger enterprises always have to be providers of scalable services on the grid? (Amazon.com, Ebay, Yahoo, Google, all provide scalable web services. As Wal-Mart enters e-commerce will they be able to rely on services of others?)
- Is interaction design (The iPod), going to be the key differentiator, that is the ability to assemble the experience for the end-user that makes the business process enjoyable.
- Is multi-tenant architecture a pre-requisite for scalable provisioning and management of services?
- Key success factors:
- Interaction design
- Scalable service delivery
- Avoiding single-source suppliers
[2] Google: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-08-14-n43.html
[3] Microsoft: http://www.healthvault.com/
[4] Ruby On Rails, PHP, .NET, J2EE
For general information, please see the paper "Web-based Service Industry" (PDF) of the SOCIETY TECHNOLOGIES ADVISORY GROUP.
