Understanding Co-service

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C HAPTER 5: R ESEARCH A NALYSIS AND D ISCUSSION

5.1. U NDERSTANDING C O - SERVICE

From comparing the research finding and literature reviews, a comprehensive understand of co-service as a collaborative practice is derived. The findings from the interview did indeed indicate that the description and characteristics of co -service reflects and resonates with the description and characteristics of collaborative services in Chapter 2, Literature Reviews.

5.1.1. Co-service as a Collaborative Practice

This research found through interview and literature reviews that the co-service is a collaborative initiative with aims to achieve beyond the common prospective goals of the participating agents. By comparing the interview results with the reviewed literatures, the characteristics of co-service and the relevant implication of such characteristics of co-service as a collaborative practice has been identified and summarized in Table 5.1.

Co-service is a root-up collaboration practice that require and is supported by the participating agents’ active involvement. In other words, the co-service is a collaboration practice that is initiated by individual stakeholders that share common interests and actively participate in the collaboration process to achieve beyond the common interest. Such root-up practice requires active involvement of the interested individual stakeholders and will be more effective as the more interested individual stakeholders are interested in participating. This also implies that co-service can be supported by passive platforms that enable the interested participating agents to collaborate.

Since co-service is a root-up collaboration practice with active collaborating participating agents, it will contain the characteristic such that the distinction between producer and consumer will be extremely ambiguous. Indeed, from the interview results and the reviewed literature, the co-service collaboration practice is created when such distinction is blurred. Therefore, from this logic, it is apparent

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Another characteristic of co-service is that it requires a decentralized environment for collaboration. Co-service is introduced and supported by root-up initiatives; hence, this implies that co-service emerged from a decentralized environment and thrive under it. Moreover, since the co-service is introduced practiced in an environment with blurred producer and consumer distinction, the implication is that co-service would need a decentralized environment in order to be initiated and supported.

This research has also noticed the “x for x” relationship characteristic of co-service. Co-service is founded on the foundation that participating agents can collaborate on a platform and upon a platform. In other words, the passive platforms that support co-service can facilitate collaboration on it as well as allow collaboration to facilitate it. The research also found that, the “x for x” relationship characteristics of co-service would imply and initiate co-creation behavior for developing solutions or efforts that facilitate such relationship.

This research also found the iterative value creation and consumption characteristics that co-service activities incur. The demand for service and service will be created and consumed from intense interaction between participating agents.

In a special scenario where participating agents simultaneously demand and offer services, the service can be traded. Essentially, this scenario would enable the activity of trading service with and for another service. Usually this special scenario occurs when the service can be easily delivered with low entry barrier. This kind of service is referred to as “cheap” services since it does not associate with significant monetary, social and experience values.

Another characteristic of co-service is that value is created with emphasis on social and experience values while monetary value is the result of two. From the interview results, it is clear that co-service is founded on the basis of creating social and experience values. Furthermore, since the focus of a service is to enhance the social and experience values, thus, it is more apparent that co-service place

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emphasis on creating social and experience values. From the interview, this research also found that the creation of social and experience values are proportional to the creation of monetary value. In other words, the social and experience value created through co-service practices dictates the monetary value that can be extracted from the co-service practice.

The practice of co-service has the characteristics of incurring iterations between collective and connective collaboration with emphasis on developing the connective collaboration. This research found that co-service requires an adequate collection participating agents and contributions from participating agents for the connection between them to occur. This collection to connection process is also regarded as interaction. Value creation and consumption is made through such interaction. For a co-service to achieve its iterative value creation and consumption characteristic, the co-service practice needs to continue further collection of participating agents and contribution from participating agents after a successful connective collaboration is made. Co-service’s value creation and consumption iterations require such connection to occur, thus, the emphasis of co-service is on developing a successful the connective collaboration. Such collection iteration is supported by the previous collection and connection, thus, this is regarded as a recursive process. For example, within the context of co-service with content, the collective collaboration allows the participating agents to gather relevant content and the connective collaboration extracts the desired content. This recursively iterative process would also funnels the result that can provide the most value to the participating agents.

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 Supported by active involvement of the participating agents

 Enhanced by increasing number of actively involved participating agents

 Can be supported by passive platforms, i.e. platforms that do not initiate the collaboration, only support it Blurred distinction

 Thrive under a decentralized environment

“x for x”

relationship

 Participating agents can collaborate on a platform and upon a platform

 Would cause co-creation activities to occur in order to facilitate such relationship characteristics

Iterative value creation and consumption

 Emerged from intense interaction between participating agents

 “Cheap” services can traded when participating agents simultaneous demand and offer services Emphasis on collaboration since value creation and consumption iteration is dependent on successful connective collaboration

 This recursive iteration process would imply for result that can provide the most values to all participating agents.

Table 5.1.: A summary of the characteristics of co-service and their implications

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5.1.2. Applying Co-service in the Web

This research found that crowdservicing is a reflection of co-service in the Web.

The description and characteristics of crowdservicing from the reviewed literature strongly reflect the characteristics of co-service. Namely, the idea of crowdservicing as a collaborative practice reflect to the characteristics of co-service including root-up, have “x for x” relationship, emphasize on creating social and experience values, recursive iterations between collective and connective collaboration, and function in a decentralized environment. Therefore, the hypothesis previously made in this study that crowdservicing is related to co-service is proven. Essentially, crowdservicing is a special case of co-service under the condition that co-service is practiced in the World Wide Web with loosely coupled participating agents.