Viable service systems and business process management

Bc. Olayemi Michael Olawepo

Master's thesis

Abstract:

Understandably we are in a service based economy, which is a knowledge intensive system itself. Participating agents are interconnected to each other in a way that has never been seen before. Organizations, nations, people, and technologies interact with each other forming a complex system that has been a challenge in today’s business. Over the years organizations evolved to rely more and more on information technology in driving businesses. Disciplines evolved within and outside information technology to tackle the fast changing business requirements, but the complexity of the systems we run businesses on, do not have the agility required to cope. This thesis seeks to explore the process of service innovation by harnessing the viable system model as a conceptual framework for understanding adaptable service systems. Viable system model (VSM) is composed of a recursive structure which is both generator and absorber of complexity but highly adaptive to change. VSM captures complex interaction of “the whole” i.e. all participating agents in the systems. A case study for sms based mobile payment service system is provided in this thesis. SMS based mobile payment service system is a service that enable mobile phone users to interact with their bank account through their mobile phones in an economical, secured and efficient manner i.e. Transactions may include checking balance, account transactions, pay-ments, credit application and other banking activities via a mobile device. The proposed solution is combined with goal-driven business process management to allow closer interconnection of goals and value proposition, this results to an adaptable service system.

Keywords

Complex adaptive system, viable system, law of requisite variety, cybernetics, operational intelligence, business activity monitoring, agents, business process management, event pro-cessing, conceptual modeling

Language used: English

Date on which the thesis was submitted / produced: 30. 5. 2011

Thesis defence

• Date of defence: 27. 6. 2011
• Supervisor: RNDr. Zdenko Staníček, Ph.D.
• Reader: Mgr. Filip Procházka, Ph.D.

Masaryk University

Faculty of Informatics

Master programme / field:
Applied Informatics / Service Science, Management and Engineering (eng.)