Metamodel for Service Analysis and Design Based on an Operational View of Service and Service Systems

This paper presents a metamodel that addresses service system analysis and design based on an operational view of service that traverses and integrates three essential layers: service activities, service systems, and value constellations. The metamodel's service-in-operation perspective and underlying premises diverge from a view of service systems as systems of economic exchange that has appeared a number of times in the journal Service Science. In addition to the metamodel itself, this paper's contributions include an explanation of eight premises on which it is based plus clarifications concerning concepts such as service, service system, customer, product/service, coproduction and cocreation of value, actor role, resources, symmetrical treatment of automated and nonautomated service systems, and the relationship between service-dominant logic and service systems. Many articles have discussed these topics individually; few, if any, have tied them together using an integrated metamodel.