Years ago, a cynical friend remarked to me that when organizations hire companies to come in and implement enterprise software, what they are really buying is redesign of their operations. That is true, but let’s not lose balance: without enterprise software, redesigned operations will sink back into chaos.
In the future, service design will iteratively develop one hypercomplex deliverable.
A service is a hyperobject. A service is a multidimensional lattice laced so densely along so many vectors that the designer’s primitive tomography of “visual communications” cannot capture its being, or even do justice to its kind of being.
You could stack printer plots of experience maps and service blueprints and ecosystem maps higher than the stratosphere, but the more complete the documentation, the more unmanageable the towering edifice of knowledge grows, until it collapses into incomprehensible paper rubble.
Early last week Susan asked me if I could sense what is next in design. I told her no. For the first time in my career I had no signal. By the end of the week, I had a strong signal.
Any form of pluricentric design (including service design) crafts hyperobjects (objects of more than three dimensions).
Only now, with the advent of artificial intelligence, can we approach hyperobjects as what they really are and design them accordingly! Human minds are (possibly with rare exceptions) confined to thinking in three dimensions within unidirectional time. With four, we are outside human intuition, and must work very differently.
So – not only are services not trees, but they are also not semi-lattices! Nor are they anything as tame as three dimensional semilattices. They have at least four dimensions I can count:
- Touchpoints along channels – line
- Omnichannel motion across channels – plane
- Delivery operations – volume
- Actor – tesseract (since all three dimensions are duplicated by each actor, yet share the same hyperobject)
And woven through this 4D space (the word hyperloom comes to mind) are innumerable threads gordian knotted into a dense hypermesh:
- Value exchanges among actors
- Qualitative and quantitative data about actors
- Measurements of various events within the service
- Nonhuman service actors (ironically ANT’s flat ontology might only make sense in information hyperspace! Entities like data stores might end up making most sense inside of the actor dimension… hmmmm)
- Team/-member responsibilities for shared opportunities, shared outcomes, implementations, etc.
I’m going on record. You heard it here first.
Services are hyperobjects.
Because services are hyperobjects, they cannot be adequately rendered by any amount of planar expression.
Until we learn to model, document, develop and manage services as hyperobjects — something only now possible thanks to AI — service design is an exercise in futility, doomed to partial success at best.