| Résume |
Supervisor: Dr. Youakim Badr
The sector of services, also known as tertiary sector, is one of three main industrial sectors of an advanced economy including sectors of industry and agriculture. In modern economies, the sector of services is the most important one in terms of workforce, revenues and potential of growth. Recently, companies undergo deep changes due to the social attitudes, to the competitiveness and to the economic conditions of the globalization.
Previously, companies used to exchange goods based on a classical model of trade. Nowadays, the model of exchange is based on services. As a consequence, the structure of enterprises has radically changed. In fact, services tend to be multidisciplinary and invoke many aspects of science. Untill now, all properties of a given enterprise are studied in
different disciplines such as Information Technology, Sociology, Economy, law, marketing,
psychology, production, and so on. Based upon the reductionist theory that asserts that the nature of complex things is reduced to the nature of sums of simpler or more fundamental things, the complex system of the enterprise can be explained by the reduction to its fundamental parts. Essentially, economy is reducible to processes (i.e. businesses, production, planning …), social is reducible to client’s management, knowledge and intelligence are reducible to information systems etc.
Such a reductive approach has proven to be useless to the ecosystem of services. The enterprises are frequently so complex that their behavior appears "new" or "emergent". They cannot be deduced from the properties of the elements alone and they cannot be determined (or explained) by the sum of its component parts alone. Instead, the enterprise as a whole determines in an important way how the parts behave. A global model of services becomes a crucial challenge to design and study service systems.
Throughout this report we propose a common and generic approach to define a holistic model for service-based enterprises. Our work is built upon the work of previous master thesis that deals with services modeling [2].
This report is organized as follows:
• First part is a state of the art of services. We introduce the current ecnonomical context where services account for an important part of the world economy. This context has favored the creation of a new multidisciplinary discipline tha aims at systemizing service innovation. The need for discipline is due to the urge of enhancing productivity in the tertiary section. On this purpose, we explore some existing approaches of enterprise modeling and find that there’s an urgent need to create new models that suit the particular need of economy.
• This observation legitimates the research on the area of ‘service enterprise modeling’. Our modeling approach is based on knowledge: Services enterprises have proven to be settled on the capital of knowledge provided by their employees. These types of enterprises are known as Knowledge Intensive Firms. As a matter of fact, they’re the principal active elements of modern economy. Hence, we view service delivery as a particular of knowledge exchange between entities. We illustrate our approach through an example of service delivery: Outsourcing. The last part introduces a new approach based on a network model inspired from the internet.
This work has also contributed in the creation of a collaborative public space that aims at sharing information about service science and enterprise modeling.
We conclude our work and recall the contribution of this thesis. In addition, we reveal potential future works. |