In the research design section, this study was positioned in the interdisciplinary field of service research as a combination of service operations management, service engineering, design science research, and service science. The contribution to the literature is introduced through the same domains, excluding design science research which is introduced in the sub-section of the methodological contribution. Despite the strong information focus, information system science was excluded in order to maintain the dominant perspective of service information.
Service operations management (SOM) focuses on production processes where the customer can input an object or the customer can be the object (Sampson, 2012). The SOM domain is interested in improving the quality and performance of service operations (Slack et al., 2007). Originally service operations management was not very interested in value creation even though the researchers had also ideas from the service marketing discipline (Voss et al., 2008). Information has a strong role as a resource but how it is managed or used in the service context has not been the most attractive topic in SOM research. This study contributes to service operations management research by two major inputs: 1) service operations management is management through information, even if no automation or technology is involved, and 2) service operations management has much to offer for service information management, especially if service information is managed by maintaining the service and work system focus.
The first input requires conceptual processing and explanation before the message is clear. Using and creating information is integration and producing information resources even if it is not conscious. Integration and producing are work that can be automated in some cases. According to Grönroos and Voima (2013), these frames should not be used together when value creation is analysed, but here it is proposed that when service operations are managed through information, they should be used together. Information as any resource can be produced without having a customer, which causes a situation that
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value creation potential exists but not the actor who would create value. Integration and production require managerial interventions, otherwise value creation may not succeed or resource inventories are created. The second input focuses on these interventions and the different logics that are embedded in service systems. Service follows a certain logic, information processing a certain logic, experience creation a certain logic, design a certain logic, and so on. Close to the shop floor operations, these logics are embedded into activities or changes. At the higher abstraction level, the connections between different logics can be explored and acknowledged in the form of architecture, as was demonstrated through the design artifact in which the connections and processing were viewed as information.
The service engineering (SE) domain originates from the engineering tradition and includes at least two different sub-domains: service engineering focusing on services in industrial systems (Cavalieri and Pezzotta, 2012) and service engineering focusing on the technical view of services (Bullinger et al. 2003). It is grounded on the argument that services are usually under-designed and inefficiently developed. This study contributes to the field of service engineering by providing a design artifact that has been tested in a non-industrial context (a social and healthcare system) and where the focus of the design artifact is in both design and operations. However, even this view is challenged by Vargo and Akaka (2009, p. 32): “as traditionally practiced, management and engineering tend to be focused primarily internally toward design specifications, operational processes and efficiencies in the creation of output, rather than toward the broader value co-creation space.” In this study, the value creation space is acknowledged more extensively than in traditional engineering studies, when value creation is seen through resource integration and production functionalities. The main argument is that there is practically no way to improve value creation or co-creation if it cannot be connected to real activities. Therefore this study contributes to the service engineering literature by stating that service information resource has both tangible and intangible nature, and therefore it can be conceptualized and described in a flexible way as a link between abstract value creation and concrete operations.
Service science (SS) is an emergent field in service-focused research disciplines that relies on four main principles: service systems as basic constructions for service science, value propositions as a basic relationship of service, access to resource as a basic operation of service systems, and physical symbol systems as a basic substrate for service system computation (Maglio and Spohrer, 2013). Service science aims at breaking some constraints that often prohibit the creation of knowledge. Maglio and Spohrer (ibid.) for example state that value co-creation emerges from the interaction of many parts, and it can be formalized, analysed, and designed despite its complexity. A service system can configure four types of resources dynamically: people, technologies, organizations, and information. While value propositions and access to resource are important principles, the fourth principle is the most relevant in this study: “Service system entities compute and coordinate actions with others through symbolic processes of valuing and symbolic
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processes of communicating” (Maglio and Spohrer, 2013, p. 4). Valuing refers to reasoning about value and communicating is (often) an effective symbolic process (ibid.). This study focused on valuing the content of information and ways of delivering it to potential customers or use situations. While service science highlights the role of service systems, most studies fail to analyse what this service system is and how it can be managed. Based on this study and the design artifact construction, a potential reason for this can be proposed and new ways of entering the service system suggested. First of all, the processes and functionalities in the design artifact are based on symbolic processes. When valuing is combined with the design artifact, it can be stated that valuing as reasoning takes also place in the local contexts, and extracting the symbolic processes as information requires understanding the local context. By extracting the experiential information and transforming it to information may also reveal the valuing logic, and valuing may be connected, controlled or managed through the approach that was proposed in publication 4 to manage systemic variety. On the basis of these arguments it can be proposed that valuing is information processing and communication is producing new information resources or actions based on the integrated information resources.