Toward a Service Management Quality Model

What We Can Learn about Business Modeling from Homeostasis

“…We have shown elsewhere that for an organization to exist, it needs to maintain a number of norms (states that remain stable or constant) for a set of observers [14][15][16][17][18][19]. A company such as Compaq, for example, existed for some 20 years (since 1982 until its acquisition by HP in 2002).…”

“…The concept of an open system explains the threats and opportunities posed by the environment to the organization [14][15][16][17][18][19]. An open system draws energy from its environment in order to decrease its entropy.…”

“…To maintain order an open system draws energy from its environment. In terms of our discussion above, this means that organizations exchange goods, services, ideas and money with their environment in order to maintain their internal relationships in specific states so that their stakeholders identify them [14][15][16][17][18][19]. Organizations, therefore, must establish relationships with other organizations [14][15][16][17][18][19].…”

“…The constancy of these states depends on the constancy of the internal environment, which in turn depends on narrow limits enforced on the exchanges with the external environment. To be closer to the business modeling literature, we will use the terms norms and tolerances proposed in [17] for the stable states and the narrow limits imposed on them.…”

Service Systems and Value Modeling from an Appreciative System Perspective

“…In its most general form, a system is defined as a set of interrelated elements as viewed by an observer [11,12,13,21]. The system exists, or survives, for a given observer for as long as the observer can identify it.…”