Designing Service Systems at EPFL
Thesis defence by Gorica Tapandjieva, entitled “Designing, Aligning and Visualizing Service Systems”, supervised by Prof. Alain Wegmann at EPFL.
“Our main result is an ontology for SEAM service-modeling. Our contributions are the heuristics that define how the ontology relates to the perceived reality: they focus on behavior rather than organization and put an emphasis on service instances rather than service types. We also define alignment based on properties of the systems’ behavior. This thesis shows that it is possible to model an organization by implementing the concept of service as defined by our ontology. This ontology supports the design of service systems that align across both IT and business services. As we worked with over a hundred IT services, we provide a series of visualization prototypes of a service cartography to describe and relate the different views required to manage services.
