The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research has launched 18 research projects to build up joint research structures with the Asian-Pacific region. In this context, researchers of ERCIS collaborate on understanding and designing the “Networked Service Society”.

With the rise of the service economy, the prosperity of industrial countries is more than ever based on engineering, selling, and delivering highly advanced services. In addition, some recent break-through innovations in IT enable companies, public administrations, and individuals to network around the globe in near real-time. Against the backdrop of these two mega trends, flexible and efficient networking increasingly is an essential prerequisite for companies to enter and serve their markets globally.

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With the research done in our project, our mission is to contribute to theory and to the innovative design of IT artifacts in three decisive areas:

•  Professionalization: Whereas services today tend to be developed non-systematically and are often provided to customers in a reactive fashion, value creation in the future Networked Services Society must be proactive. In addition, the development of management concepts and IT artifacts used in international service networks has to consider differences with respect to the intercultural contexts that shape different manifestations of service societies. For instance, the service societies in Germany or South Korea tend to be more focused on industrial services in the B2B sector, whereas services in Australia, New Zealand or the US tend to be focused on professional or personal services.
• Digitalization: Value Creation in the Networked Service Society has to be both effective and efficient. To address both perspectives, appropriate IT artifacts need to enable global collaboration amongst companies and public administrations at reasonable cost. In particular, service computing has enabled companies to tap into the resources of other companies around the globe. This results in a need to design flexible service infrastructures as well as predefined business content that can be included into service processes at run time, irrespective of space constraints.
• Sustainability: Against the background of the demographic change and the scarcity of natural resources, services of the future must comply with the social and ecological responsibility that is expected from highly developed industrial nations. Services that account for the special needs of elderly people and services that enable networks to design their business processes in a sustainable way are two prominent examples.