Describing Service Systems

There are many different normative frameworks for describing service systems that take a distinct conceptual perspective. They emphasize the physical arrangement or topology, the functions or processes, the chronology of experience, the causality of value creation, the flow of information or people, or other characteristics. These frameworks are deeply embedded in service system research and design practice, but we have not known how useful or natural they are. University students new to service science concepts described a service system they all used—the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system. They identified and categorized the services they encountered or that were involved when they used BART and then created diagrams to depict the system. There was substantial variation in how students described BART in terms of scope, overall number of services, and their granularity. There was also great diversity in the classification of services and in the diagrams or other representations students created. Since most students had little exposure to normative frameworks for describing service systems, their diagrams were often hybrids of different frameworks. C © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.