Next Week’s podcast guest, Jeff Sussna founder of Ingineering.IT, facilitates Adaptive IT through teaching, coaching, and strategic design. He is the author of a new book Designing Delivery: Rethinking IT in the Digital Service Economy.
An excerpt from the podcast: 
Joe: It’s really kind of a digital service type of atmosphere that you create. I think you talk about four dimensions of Digital Service. Can you tell me what those are?
Jeff Sussna: Sure. And again, this all drives from the idea that just building software that works is necessary but not sufficient. So, the first dimension of Digital Service is Outcomes, and this is kind of a service dominant view of functionality. So, when we think about it in terms of quality, the first question is, “Does the software work properly? Does the functionality work?” On one level, if we build a widget that lets somebody enter their phone number, we want to make sure that that widget works and actually accepts the phone number and stores it in the database properly and so on and so forth. But, what we’re really after is ‘Does this widget actually help the customer do what it is they’re trying to do?’ The second is Access. And again, the fact that I have this nice widget and the widget is useful is great but if it’s slow or I can’t get to it or all of those things I talked about before then there is no service quality. The service doesn’t work. The third is what I call Coherence, which really applies to the idea of the customer journey from service design. So again, I have this nice widget but how does the widget work? How do I learn how it works? How do I get my system configured so I can use the widget? How do I integrate the functionality of the widget with the rest of my business?
In service, there’s always a journey where the customer interacts through a variety of steps that happen over time and those all have to hang together. Let’s say that I’m having trouble with the widget and I called customer support and customer support doesn’t know what I’m talking about or they don’t understand either the software or me well enough to understand the context of my problem and they’re like, “Well, it just works this way.” “Well, I don’t understand it. I’m trying to do x and I can’t.” If the customer support person doesn’t understand me as a customer and what I’m trying to do with their service well enough then that’s a service quality failure just as much as if there were software bug. And then, the final one, which is the most subtle and sort of deepest level of the book, is what I call Continuity, which refers to this idea of services needing to change over time. To go back to the online invoicing example, I started using an invoicing service a number of years ago. I’m an independent consultant, so the ability to invoice is very important to me. And, when I first started using it, it solved probably about 70% of my problem, which was find because it was great because the simple idea that I could log onto a website and enter my time and generating invoice was so wonderful that I didn’t care about the other 30%.
A year later that’s not good enough anymore. I need the service to continually adapt and improve itself to follow along with my needs and the changing market and I need it furthermore to be able to deliver that change. So, these days I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of logging into a site that we use every day and all of a sudden it looks different. They have this nice, sexy, new UI that’s better than the old one. But, from my perspective it’s just confusing because wait a minute, I expected everything to be blue and have round buttons and now all of a sudden everything is green and it has square buttons. What am I supposed to do? This process of delivering change and helping people understand what it means and how to use it, again, is another aspect of service quality.
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