ISSD Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Patterns improve designs by replacing an ad hoc approach with a successful one. Design patterns also promote reuse, which has the immediate benefit of reduced training, implementation and maintenance costs, and longer-term benefits of encouraging and reinforcing consistency and standardization. Reuse at more abstract levels enables interoperability between systems that follow patterns that differ at more concrete levels. The design patterns for information systems and services span the broad “abstraction hierarchy” we’ve talked about when modeling processes. For example, we can describe business activity using: • Business model or organizational patterns: marketplace, auction, supply chain, build to order, drop shipment, vendor managed inventory, etc • Business process patterns: procurement, payment, shipment, reconciliation, etc. • Business information patterns: catalog, purchase order, invoice, etc. and the information components they contain for party, time, location, measurement, etc.

Many design patterns for service experiences are abstract qualitative depictions of the "value chains" that create positive outcomes for customers or other stakeholders. They provide frameworks for design choices that encourage or constrain the experiences, so they can serve as templates for a set of related service offerings that vary in the number or intensity of encounters or co-production. Traditional service design mechanisms like scheduling and demand management can be used as patterns in this way.