Work as a Service

Abstract

Improving work within and among enterprises is of pressing importance. We take a services-oriented view of both doing and coordinating work by treating work as a service. We discuss how large work engagements can be decomposed into a set of smaller interconnected service requests and conversely how larger engagements can be built up from smaller ones. Encapsulating units of work into service requests enables assignment to any organization qualified to service the work, and naturally lends itself to ongoing optimization of the overall engagement. A service request contains two distinct parts: coordination information for coordinating work and payload information for doing work. Coordination information deals with business concerns such as risk, cost, schedule, and value co-creation. On the other hand, payload information defines the deliverables and provides what is needed to do the work, such as designs or use-cases. This general two-part decomposition leads to a paradigm of work as a two-way information flow between service systems, rather than as a business process that needs to be implemented or integrated between two organizations. Treating work as information flow allows us to leverage extant understanding of information systems and facilitates information technology support for work using mainstream service-oriented architectures (SOA). Significant benefits from this approach include agility in setting up large engagements to be carried out by distributed organizations, visibility into operations without violating providers' privacy or requiring changes to internal processes, responsiveness to unpredictability and change, and ongoing optimizations over competing business objectives.

Linked USDL: A Vocabulary for Web-Scale Service Trading

“…Although (semantic) Web services work provides advanced support for discovering or composing technical services, it disregards the fundamental socio-economic context of real-world services (e.g., value chains and offerings), and does not cover the widespread manual services (e.g., consulting) [3]. Complementary work on Workflow and Business Process Management has focussed on the operationalisation of the processes within enterprises [2,3,5], which has more recently also incorporated human activities [7]. This work is, however, centred on a procedural view on how activities are carried out within an organisation which is orthogonal to the business characteristics of the services offered (e.g., speed of internet connection offered) which are essential to service trading.…”

Cognitive Coordination of Global Service Delivery

“…This has led to standardized communication protocols and encapsulations of service work, as well as coordination mechanisms that deal with interdependencies using business process and business entity lifecycles [20]- [23]. Rather than strict business process management approaches, we use an instantiation of the work-as-a-service protocol and algebra [24], [25] to encapsulate work into pieces and define operations for its management; this flexible protocol is amenable to handling uncertainties that are inherent in human-intensive work.…”

“…Work-as-a-service formalizes various operations such as merge, tear, pause, and resume which allow the control actions we will need to develop the RHC algorithms [24]- [26]. We do not go into details of the work-as-aservice algebra in this paper, but focus on the larger optimized coordination enabled by it.…”

Conceptualizing and Programming Hybrid Services in the Cloud

“…4,5 In all these works, a fundamental issue is how to utilize human capabilities. We observed two main approaches in utilizing human capabilities: (i) passively proposing tasks and waiting for human input, such as in crowd platforms, 3 and (ii) actively finding and binding human capabilities into applications.…”