Towards a Taxonomy for Data-Driven Digital Services

Abstract

Digitization is transforming every domain nowadays, leading to a growing body of knowledge on digital service innovation. Coupled with the generation and collection of big data, data-driven digital services are becoming of great importance to business, economy and society. This paper aims to classify the different types of data-driven digital services, as a first step to understand their characteristics and dynamics. A taxonomy is developed and the emerging characteristics include data acquisition mechanisms, data exploitation, insights utilization, and service interaction characteristics. The examined services fall into 15 distinct types and are further clustered into 3 classes of types: distributed analytics intermediaries, visual data-driven services, and analytics-embedded services. Such contribution enables service designers and providers to understand the key aspects in utilizing data and analytics in the design and delivery of their services. The taxonomy is set out to shape the direction and scope of scholarly discourse around digital service innovation research and practice.