To be successful, Digital Transformation cannot be considered as a matter of a single department or a single organization, regardless of whether the organization is private or public. Its mission consists in providing new inter-disciplinary or even trans-disciplinary information services. Therefore, collective intelligence is a key for its success. A collaborative approach enabling innovation and co-creation is necessary to develop sustainable and democratic information services. As a potential solution, we propose a novel approach called Tiers-Lieu for Services (TLS), that we introduce in this paper. In addition, we consider conceptual modeling as the central underpinning technique for co-designing information services and succeeding in a TLS. In the paper we report on two experimental TLS conducted in the context of our continuing education program. Based on these explorations we will further study the concept of TLS and progress towards defining a method for conducting TLS.
In the era of Digital Transformation, organizations are struggling to find new ways to
develop and provide their services and products, and to transform their business
models. They wish to innovate, to be first using new technologies, to be more efficient and
attractive. But, Digital Transformation is not just about the adoption of new information
technologies and computerization of human activities. It embraces much broader
strategic ambitions and involves fundamental changes in the activities, structure and even
culture of the organization [
The research question we ask in this work is: What is an efficient way to make organizations and citizens to collaborate in the context of sustainable digital transformation? As a potential candidate we consider the approach of Tiers-Lieu for Services (TLS), that we introduce in this paper. As we explain in this paper, TLS provides means to drive ideas from people, to put them in creative situations, to eliminate cognitive and social barriers, to foster their creativity and, the most important, to co-create democratic and sustainable information services.
The second question is: What techniques are necessary to make a TLS efficient?
Here, we claim that conceptual modeling is the answer. Indeed, conceptual modeling is
the underpinning technique for co-designing information services [
To sum-up, the research goal of this work is twofold: (1) to explore the TLS approach as a way to innovate in business and public activities with information services, and (2) to demonstrate the value of conceptual modeling for succeeding a TLS. In the following section we present the foundation of our proposal: the TLS approach and the role of conceptual modeling in it. In Sec. 3 we report on two tentative TLS, while in Sec. 4 we discuss the findings and limits of our study, and draw the research agenda. Section 5 concludes the paper. 2 2.1
According to Burret [
The concept of TL was mainly developed in France and its usage is expanding [
The goal of a Tiers-Lieu for Services (TLS) is to build information services [
TSL allows to overcome situations that would lead to an impasse the development of any individual organization. By acting together, organizations and individual citizens have much better chance to succeed. TLS transforms individual problems into common challenges by building common information assets – information services. To enable such co-creation, TLS provides a regulatory framework for the activities to be done as a part of it, that is for building democratic, accountable and inclusive information services. A TLS can be launched by any action fitting into the context of digital progress of Society. The nature of the action should be trans-disciplinary, trans-institutional or even trans-national. Conducting a TLS consists in four iterative steps: 1. Formulating the intention of the TLS: the initial definition of the TLS intention can be issued as an individual (citizen or organization) initiative or proposed by a consortium of organizations. 2. Building a heterogeneous network of contributors: contributors can be collected via a public announcement or by personal invitations, seeking to have all necessary skills and expertise, and representatives from all concernment parties. 3. Conducting explorations with the aim of achieving actionable results in the form of information services and related value propositions.
Designing and setting-up information services: based on the exploration results, deciding on the explorations to be materialized as information services and service systems, co-designing and setting up these services. The exploration and design sessions will use different co-creation and conceptualization techniques. 2.3
The main purpose of a TLS is to explore and co-design information services. In order
to take consistent and responsible positions, contributors coming from heterogeneous
horizons need to speak a common language allowing them to understand each other and
build informational consensus. We claim that such language is a conceptual modeling.
In fact, this claim is not so original as many researchers, notably Olivé [
Several types of models can be used in the information service design for
representing the value and the content of information services [
We have conducted two exploratory TLS, one in November and the other in December of 2018, both in the context of our continuing education program, a Certificate of Advanced Studies (CAS), on Business Development with Information Services. This CAS, is dedicated to the practitioners willing to upgrade their knowledge and skills in the engineering and management of information systems and services, and to become responsible actors of digital transformation of their organizations. The CAS lasts one semester and awards 15 credits ECTS. The participants come from various organizations and have different roles such as business analyst, IS manager, project manager, IS designer, developer, or any other business activity demanding information services for its execution. In total, 13 people, students of this program, participated in the experiments. Our primary goal was to offer the participants an experience of participating in a TLS and learning how to conduct one. By the way, one of the participants easily reproduced the experiment in the context of his business practice. The second goal was to demonstrate the value of conceptual modeling in a TLS – to assess its contribution to the success of the TLS.
Before the first TLS all participants had a short course on this subject. They also had
courses and training of various design and creativity techniques such as Business Model
Canvas [
Based on our observation and the appreciation of the participants and initiators of the TLS, we consider the results of the two TLS as successful. Participants learned a new approach to co-creating information services that they found very effective. The TLS process also demonstrated that conceptual modeling experts were more efficient than those who did not yet have this capability. We report on these two TLS in the following subsections. Pictures in Fig. 1 illustrate our exploratory TLS.
The goal of the first TLS was to explore the potentialities of implementing a novel digital artefact and to identify information services that could be developed based on this technology. The subject of the exploration was a technological approach aiming to improve the quality of life of elderly patients with neurodegenerative disease like Dementia or Alzheimer. The proposed approach is materialized in two devices: a wristband and a dolometer. The wristband allows to measure patients’ vital signals like heart rate, blood oxygen, skin temperature, movements and other activities, and to detect behavior patterns. The dolometer indicates the level of pain or discomfort based on the data received from the wristband and the environmental parameters like noise, temperature, light, etc. It also serves for the pain assessment refinement and data storage.
In total, this TLS lasted 10 hours (6 hours on Friday afternoon and 4 hours on
Saturday morning), and was organized as follows: First, the creator of the approach (a
researcher of our university) presented the subject and the two devices. Then, the
participants spent some time to clarify the subject by asking additional questions to the
presenter. The rest of the time was divided into several brainstorming sessions where
participants used various conceptualization techniques such as Business Model Canvas
[
The business model canvas approach was used first with the aim to better understand the value of the proposed technology. However, at this stage only very generic value could be assessed. To progress, the participants decided to try creativity triggers to identify new value propositions and so new services. This led to the identification of several new but diverging ideas. Finally, the situation changed when the participants decided to draw a conceptual model of this domain. During this modeling session they created an information space (see the model in Fig. 2) that lead to a common understanding of the domain and allowed to converge their ideas, and even triggered new service propositions. In particular, one complex service (service system), namely a platform for collecting the information by means of the two devices (wristband and dolometer) and sharing it with all concerned actors (caregiver, nurse, doctor), emerged as a potential value proposition.
Quite obviously, conceptual modelling was a way to facilitate group intelligence, to trigger most of the ideas and to better scope the identified services. 3.2
The aim of the second TLS was to explore how societal goals could be reached with the help of information services. It had as subject “Digital service and regulation development for the collective design of Neighborhood Local Plans (NLP) in the Canton of Geneva”. The TLS took place in a co-working space in Geneva, and lasted 15 hours (10 hours on Friday and 5 hours on Saturday morning). The initiator of this TSL, a representative of the NLP initiative, presented the subject and the main issues related to defining NLP. In particular, he stressed on the difficulty of establishing collaboration between all parties involved in elaborating plans and related regulations, the length and rigidity of the process, the missing digital support, and so on. The participants were invited to answer the following questions: • How to write a regulation (a normative document) in collaboration? What information services would be needed to support such collaboration? • Can information services propel the collective conception of normative texts?
After a short brainstorming session, the participants organized themselves into 3
groups. The rest of the time was naturally split in 3 periods of co-creation with
intermediate presentations of the progress in group work, and the final presentations. The
group No2 had the most advanced skills in conceptual modeling. So, they naturally
started with elaborating a conceptual domain model (see Fig. 3), which appeared to be
a valuable means for identifying information services. They designed a service system
– a platform providing services for managing roles, ideas and initiatives, collecting
needs of inhabitants, studding feasibility, co-deciding, etc. The advance of this group
was the most prominent. The group No1 focused on technical aspects of collaborative
work and undertook the elaboration of an architecture for a platform supporting
collaborative editing, change log, and document versioning, multichannel notification. The
real progress was observed once the group elaborated a conceptual model with the help
of a facilitator (one of the teachers). The group No3, mainly worked on defining roles
and responsibility domains in NLP projects. During the last period of the first day they
decided to merge with the group No2. Together, based on both inputs (the conceptual
domain model and the role & responsibility model) they elaborated the responsibility
space of each role and created a service model canvas [
Our explorations clearly demonstrate that having skills in conceptual modeling has a direct impact on the success of a TLS. Of course, other techniques fostering collective intelligence, such as Design Thinking, Creativity Triggers, Business Model Canvas, Service Model Canvas, are very useful. All together, the conceptualization techniques allow to better share the understanding of the domain.
The two TLS explorations are certainly not a formal proof of the effectiveness of TLS. Our intention was rather to explore the potentialities of this approach, with the aim of further formalizing it. Each TLS was based on a real case and was presented by its promoter, which, in our opinion, gives credibility to our study.
A potential threat to validity of the study is the origin of contributors. Indeed, we skipped the step of building the network of contributors as we already had our participants. There is no statistics on the best number of participants in a TLS. The main guideline is to select/invite contributors representing all concerned parties. Our participants already known each other and had collaborated together on small group projects in the context of the education program. Besides, they already learned a few design techniques and some of them had conceptual modeling practice. We do not know if similar results could be reached if none of the TLS members had design and conceptual modeling skills. However, the origin and background of the participants were sufficiently different (they work in different organizations and have different responsibilities) to consider that the context of our experiments were close to a real TLS setting.
Based on these explorations and foundations in service science [
A TLS is not a one-off meeting, it usually requires several sessions, each with a specific purpose and a variation of participants (involving new ones, losing others). Therefore, the method has to be easily adaptable by selecting on the fly the most suitable method chunks. Finally, the democratic principle is fundamental for guiding a TLS. It aims to ensure that every participant has the opportunity to express his/her opinion and to be heard, that the opinion of each participant is valuable and seriously taken into account, and that there is no hierarchy or any other clustering of participants. 5
In this paper we introduce the approach of Tiers-Lieu for Services (TLS) as a novel way to guide Digital Transformation in a collaborative, democratic and responsible way. In the context of our program of continuing education, we have experimented two TLS, each having a different intention and a different driver. The first was driven by a technology push – an introduction of a new device in the health care domain. Different ways to promote and use the device were explored and materialized in terms of information services. The second TLS faced a societal challenge – a co-development of regulations, and came-up with a proposal of a dedicated service platform. Both TLS demonstrated the value of conceptual modeling as an underpinning technique to succeed. Based on these experiments, we aim to further formalize the approach in terms of a situational method, that is a method easily adaptable to different types of TLS.