Towards Design Principles for Data-Driven Services in Industrial Environments

Abstract

The ever-growing amounts of data offer companies many opportunities to exploit them. Resulting data-driven services hold great potential for creating unique value for customers and the achievement of competitive advantages. Nevertheless, especially companies in the industrial environment struggle to implement successful data-driven service innovations. Surprisingly, there is a lack of scientific research addressing this issue. Thus, our research generates design principles for data-driven services to aid in their development. For this purpose, we present a qualitative interview study with experts in different lines of businesses among the industry sector, holding varying positions and roles in service systems. Through practical examples, we show which challenges exist in the development and use of data-driven services. On this basis, we derive design principles to help understanding data-driven services and to overcome difficulties identified in practice, notably, that allows practitioners to develop new services or re-design existing ones.