A Taxonomy of Digital Service Design Techniques

In a digital world, service designers need to apply design techniques to meet increasing user expectations. While there are many design techniques out there, the current taxonomies of design techniques provide little guidance for designers when it comes to selecting appropriate design techniques during the design process. Hence, a well-structured taxonomy is needed. This research-in-process seeks to apply a taxonomy development method to classify design techniques and to identify important dimensions in order to provide an overview of digital service design techniques. Our preliminary results present a taxonomy with five dimensions, each of which includes mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive characteristics. In future research, we plan to evaluate the usefulness of our taxonomy and compare our taxonomy with those that are currently available. Furthermore, we expect to look into the potential interrelations among the dimensions and build a model that explains and predicts the appropriate techniques for a given situation

Designing Decision Aids for Digital Service Design Technique Selection

Today, people from a multi-disciplinary background are becoming involved in digital service design processes. With the increasing number of digital service design processes in organizations, it is becoming critical to quickly onboard design novices. A huge amount of design techniques is available in digital service design processes. However, too-much-choice makes the selecting process difficult. Thus, selecting appropriate techniques is a challenge, especially for design novices. This dissertation project focuses on providing decision support for design novices to select design techniques in design processes. Several artifacts in the form of different types of classifications and web-based platforms were developed as decision aids seeking to guide novices to select design techniques in digital service design processes. A design science research paradigm was followed, and three design cycles were conducted in the entire dissertation project. Artifacts were developed and evaluated in each design cycle. In design cycle 1, an expert-based taxonomy and a set of novice-based tags were derived. In design cycle 2, the taxonomy and tags were instantiated as decision aids in a web-based platform and evaluated in a lab experiment. The evaluation demonstrated that the expert-based taxonomy outperformed the novice-based tags. In design cycle 3, an extended version of the web-based platform was developed, including a natural language user interface (UI) in combination with the taxonomy to provide selection support for design techniques. The results of the experimental evaluation of cycle 3 demonstrated that novices’ performance using graphical and natural language UI was dependent on decision-making style and duration of use. The work presented in this thesis contributes to the body of knowledge in the field of digital service design. In design cycle 1, the created taxonomy represents a theory for analysis (type I theory). In design cycle 2 and 3, the proposed design principles represent the core of a theory for design and action (type V theory) to guide the design of decision aids for supporting design novices’ selection of design techniques. Besides the theoretical contribution, the developed platform for the selection of design techniques contributes practically to help design novices select design techniques under different design situations

Exploring Maintainability Assurance Research for Service- and Microservice-Based Systems: Directions and Differences

To ensure sustainable software maintenance and evolution, a diverse set of activities and concepts like metrics, change impact analysis, or antipattern detection can be used. Special maintainability assurance techniques have been proposed for service- and microservice-based systems, but it is difficult to get a comprehensive overview of this publication landscape. We therefore conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) to collect and categorize maintainability assurance approaches for service-oriented architecture (SOA) and microservices. Our search strategy led to the selection of 223 primary studies from 2007 to 2018 which we categorized with a threefold taxonomy: a) architectural (SOA, microservices, both), b) methodical (method or contribution of the study), and c) thematic (maintainability assurance subfield). We discuss the distribution among these categories and present different research directions as well as exemplary studies per thematic category. The primary finding of our SLR is that, while very few approaches have been suggested for microservices so far (24 of 223, ?11%), we identified several thematic categories where existing SOA techniques could be adapted for the maintainability assurance of microservices

A Factor Framework for Experimental Design for Performance Evaluation of Commercial Cloud Services

Given the diversity of commercial Cloud services, performance evaluations of candidate services would be crucial and beneficial for both service customers (e.g. cost-benefit analysis) and providers (e.g. direction of service improvement). Before an evaluation implementation, the selection of suitable factors (also called parameters or variables) plays a prerequisite role in designing evaluation experiments. However, there seems a lack of systematic approaches to factor selection for Cloud services performance evaluation. In other words, evaluators randomly and intuitively concerned experimental factors in most of the existing evaluation studies. Based on our previous taxonomy and modeling work, this paper proposes a factor framework for experimental design for performance evaluation of commercial Cloud services. This framework capsules the state-of-the-practice of performance evaluation factors that people currently take into account in the Cloud Computing domain, and in turn can help facilitate designing new experiments for evaluating Cloud services.Comment: 8 pages, Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom 2012), pp. 169-176, Taipei, Taiwan, December 03-06, 201

Concept Extraction and Clustering for Topic Digital Library Construction

This paper is to introduce a new approach to build topic digital library using concept extraction and document clustering. Firstly, documents in a special domain are automatically produced by document classification approach. Then, the keywords of each document are extracted using the machine learning approach. The keywords are used to cluster the documents subset. The clustered result is the taxonomy of the subset. Lastly, the taxonomy is modified to the hierarchical structure for user navigation by manual adjustments. The topic digital library is constructed after combining the full-text retrieval and hierarchical navigation function

Building an IT Taxonomy with Co-occurrence Analysis, Hierarchical Clustering, and Multidimensional Scaling

Different information technologies (ITs) are related in complex ways. How can the relationships among a large number of ITs be described and analyzed in a representative, dynamic, and scalable way? In this study, we employed co-occurrence analysis to explore the relationships among 50 information technologies discussed in six magazines over ten years (1998-2007). Using hierarchical clustering and multidimensional scaling, we have found that the similarities of the technologies can be depicted in hierarchies and two-dimensional plots, and that similar technologies can be classified into meaningful categories. The results imply reasonable validity of our approach for understanding technology relationships and building an IT taxonomy. The methodology that we offer not only helps IT practitioners and researchers make sense of numerous technologies in the iField but also bridges two related but thus far largely separate research streams in iSchools - information management and IT management

The Dynamics of Transformation in the Development of Digital Services

Service providers are increasingly depending and using digital infrastructure and tools provided by digital platforms to transform their services and develop digital ones that meet the needs of heterogeneous end users. However, while there is an emerging literature of developing digital services, little is known about the dynamics of transformation. Using multiple cases of firms that develop digital services, the digital service taxonomy was synthesized to understand the dynamics of transformation in developing digital services. This study identifies five main dynamics: the services experience, the service process, the service capabilities, the service environment and the service delivery.  Each of those dynamics and their associated factors is explored under the objectives of business, interaction and technology. This enables us to extend the existing literature on digital service development in particular and contributes to the research of digital innovation in general

Planning strategically, designing architecturally : a framework for digital library services

In an era of unprecedented technological innovation and evolving user expectations and information seeking behaviour, we are arguably now an online society, with digital services increasingly common and increasingly preferred. As a trusted information provider, libraries are in an advantageous position to respond, but this requires integrated strategic and enterprise architecture planning, for information technology (IT) has evolved from a support role to a strategic role, providing the core management systems, communication networks, and delivery channels of the modern library. Further, IT components do not function in isolation from one another, but are interdependent elements of distributed and multidimensional systems encompassing people, processes, and technologies, which must consider social, economic, legal, organisational, and ergonomic requirements and relationships, as well as being logically sound from a technical perspective. Strategic planning provides direction, while enterprise architecture strategically aligns and holistically integrates business and information system architectures. While challenging, such integrated planning should be regarded as an opportunity for the library to evolve as an enterprise in the digital age, or at minimum, to simply keep pace with societal change and alternative service providers. Without strategy, a library risks being directed by outside forces with independent motivations and inadequate understanding of its broader societal role. Without enterprise architecture, it risks technological disparity, redundancy, and obsolescence. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this conceptual paper provides an integrated framework for strategic and architectural planning of digital library services. The concept of the library as an enterprise is also introduced