LAUSR

The emergence of data-driven services in the Internet of Things provides manufacturers of technical products the opportunity to become providers of services, which use data as primary input. The development of such smart services, however, is characterized by high complexity and uncertainty. To identify service ideas which are worth to pursue further, the potential financial impact is an important criterion. While the importance of a business case is acknowledged in service engineering, there is currently no concrete method that is integrated with the early design phases of smart services. Therefore, we propose a tool-based method for the design-integrated financial assessment of smart services. We use a design science research approach to develop a meta-model, which is implemented in a web-based tool. The experimental evaluation shows that the proposed tool provides benefits, especially in structuring the task for project teams. Therefore, it appears to be beneficial to provide interdisciplinary teams a tool-based support for the design and evaluation of smart services.