On Design and Architecture of Person-Centric Digital Service Provisioning: Approach, Fundamental Concepts, Principles and Prototypes

Thesis event information

Date and time of the thesis defence

Place of the thesis defence

L5, remote link: https://oulu.zoom.us/j/61021881609

Topic of the dissertation

On Design and Architecture of Person-Centric Digital Service Provisioning: Approach, Fundamental Concepts, Principles and Prototypes

Doctoral candidate

Master of Science Daniel Pakkala

Faculty and unit

University of Oulu Graduate School, Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, M3S

Subject of study

Information processing science

Opponent

Professor Matti Rossi, Aalto University

Custos

Professor Tero Päivärinta, University of Oulu

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On Design and Architecture of Person-Centric Digital Service Provisioning

Digitalisation and servitisation are changing society in parallel, creating interest into digital service as a socio-techno-economical concept in the intersection of the two ongoing changes. This work studies digital service as a target of design via development and operation of autonomous Information Communication Computing Automation (ICCAT) Technology -based, software-intensive digital service offerings.

The work focuses specifically on person-centric digital service provisioning, where a digital service is targeted towards individual persons as service users in a context-aware, personalised and adaptive fashion. The work studies how the design and architecture of person-centric digital service provisioning can be supported in the complex, multifaceted and continuously evolving technologically heterogeneous context. The work applies Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM) in synthesising eight included research papers, published during 2003-2019.

The results include a novel approach, with fundamental concepts and principles, for the design and architecture of person-centric digital service provisioning. Further, the results include a set of laboratory prototypes and instantiations on person-centric digital service provisioning, which suggest feasibility and generalisability of the approach and principles. The approach is targeted at supporting designers in requirements specification, design, architecting and managing the evolution of person-centric digital service offerings, independently of the rapidly changing and heterogeneous implementation technologies of ICCAT.

As novelty and contribution, the proposed approach addresses the elements of person centricity in digital service, unifies phenomenological and artefact views of person-centric digital service, establishes an implementation-technology-independent design level for person-centric digital service offerings, and supports the re-use and systematic evolution of the implementation-technology-independent designs across multiple cases of person-centric digital service offerings.

The theoretical implications of person-centric digital service as an emergent multiple-stakeholder information system, with governance boundaries influencing the design of the system, are discussed. As a practical implication, the relation of digital service engineering with software and technical systems engineering is discussed.
Last updated: 1.3.2023