On modeling value constellations to understand complex service system interactions

Urban centers face complex challenges in managing their services to continually improve their citizens' quality of life. They also face complex challenges in managing citizens' perceptions of the effectiveness of services to continually improve their resulting quality of life. We view urban areas as dynamic sociocultural systems, meaning that effectively and dynamically understanding and addressing their challenges means confronting the full complexity of factors that interact to make up the system. More precisely, we understand these systems to be complex service systems, arrangements of multiple entities and stakeholders that interact to co-create value. Decision makers of urban centers face the design problem of arranging the entities so that the most mutual value emerges from their interactions. To analyze and understand such complex systems, we suggest a new approach to service system analysis based on model composition to design and evaluate stakeholder relationships through what-if scenarios. Applied to the intriguing real-world scenario of crime and perceptions of crime in the London Borough of Sutton, we show how service system analysis - analyzing value constellations to find opportunities for reconfiguring roles and relationships that unlock value - can be applied to a sociocultural service system by focusing on the complex relationship among components that can influence complex questions, such as safety and quality-of-community. Modeling and simulating the value constellations of complex service systems can help us discover which interventions and reconfigurations will be effective and which will not. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.