WEB BUSINESS AND DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITIES
Learning from Community Networked Services
Juhana Peltonen†, David G. Messerschmitt‡† and Mikko O. J. Laine†
BIT Research Centre, Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo, Finland
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, U.S.A.
Keywords:
Web 2.0, Virtual community, Networked service system, IS development, Business development.
Abstract:
In this position paper we analyze a category of internet service firms providing what we call “community
networked services” (CNS), a concept often discussed under the broad umbrella of “Web 2.0”. In a CNS,
members of a virtual community co-create value amongst themselves with the explicit facilitation of a service
provider, often manifested by a continuously accumulating and usually open information repository capturing
user-generated content. We discuss these characteristics and their operational and managerial implications to
CNS firms, which include a smaller reliance on human workforces, a community-oriented innovation model,
a stronger disconnect between revenue and recipients of value, and greater network externalities among users.
Drawing on these observations, we argue that there is an opportunity for academic research that both under-
stands and improves upon the processes used for the integration of business development, IS development, and
user support in CNS firms. Not only can such research help improve the performance of CNS firms, but given
the high risk tolerance and experimental nature of these consumer applications, it can also capture innovations
and best practices applicable to incumbent service firms in e-commerce and enterprise software applications.
1 INTRODUCTION
In the context of emerging internet services both the
service and software industries are headed in a dis-
tinctly new direction, and in the process their fates are
becoming more intricately interlinked. That is the ba-
sic thesis of this position paper, building on research
reported elsewhere (Messerschmitt et al., 2008)
1
. A
key distinguishing characteristic of CNS’s is a focus
on loosely-coupled virtual communities whose mem-
bers co-create value internally as facilitated by a ser-
vice provider (SP)
2
. Examining these services identi-
fies new opportunities and challenges in the manage-
ment and operations of SP’s, particularly in the in-
tegration of the business development, software and
IS development, and the customer support functions
1
This work was funded by the Finnish Funding Agency
for Technology and Innovation and several industry part-
ners.
2
CNS SP’s are organizations (e.g. firms, non-profit
foundations) that strongly base their business models on one
or more CNS’s.
of a software/service firm. There is an opportunity
for both theory-building and applied research that
spreads emerging innovations and best practices and
contributes to greater effectiveness and efficiencies in
such firms, and also to carry the most meritorious of
these insights to incumbent service firms.
2 WHAT IS CNS?
In (Messerschmitt et al., 2008) a class of emerging
“virtual community service systems” called commu-
nity networked services (CNS) are defined and stud-
ied. CNS’s involve a technical platform with func-
tionality that explicitly facilitates interaction among
members of the user community. CNS’s are a
special category of service systems
3
where value
3
This is defined in (Spohrer et al., 2008) as: A service
system is a dynamic value co-creation configuration of re-
sources, including people, organizations, shared informa-
tion (language, laws, measures, methods), and technology,
546
Peltonen J., G. Messerschmitt D. and O. J. Laine M.
WEB BUSINESS AND DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITIES - Learning from Community Networked Services.
DOI: 10.5220/0002037505460551
In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST 2009), page
ISBN: 978-989-8111-81-4
Copyright
c
2009 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
is co-created
4
among community members (com-
pared to co-creation of value between users and
the SP). CNS’s serve business-to-consumer (B2C)
and consumer-to-consumer (C2C) markets, and have
some distinguishing characteristics. The most funda-
mental include:
Community Orientation. CNS’s emphasize a
membership forming one or more user communities
on a virtual communication medium. In contrast to
formal organizations, these virtual communities are
typically transparent, pursue loose and open-ended
goals, and are loosely governed.
Value Creation. In a CNS users deriveconsiderable
value through interactions with other users within
some particular service context. Unlike in typical e-
services, the role of the SP is merely to facilitate these
community activities while encouraging (rather than
precluding) direct user-created value.
Information Visibility. An information repository
is continuously accumulated as a result of user activ-
ity and widely accessible to all users. It yields in-
creasing value (for both users and the SP) over time
through large quantities of public information (as op-
posed to more limited quantities of business and trade
secrets stored in corporate IS’s).
When operational and technological practicalities are
considered, other noteworthy characteristics include:
Innovation Model. More so than incumbent ser-
vices, many SP’s appear to actively involve users in
the ongoing evolution and enhancement of services.
Exploiting the openness of the Web technologies, in-
novative capability can also be created by encourag-
ing third-parties extensions and compositions.
Smaller Reliance on Human Workforces. The
technical platform supports direct service functional-
ity and necessary support functions (e.g. billing and
user service), and customer-facing human workforces
can, to a large extent, be “crowdsourced” to the com-
munity (for instance in governance functions).
Operational Models. Operations require data cen-
ters managed by the SP, though third parties can also
host infrastructure pieces. The data centers realize
service-specific functions and the burden of main-
taining user-facing service-specific software follow-
ing the software as a service (SaaS) model
5
.
CNS represents a convergence of two trends:
all connected internally and externally to other service sys-
tems by value propositions.
4
Value co-creation (Vargo and Lusch, 2004) is con-
trasted with transactions in which there is a clear distinction
between the “sources” and “recipients” of value.
5
In SaaS, the installation of service-specific software in
the users’ access devices is avoided by executing software
in the data center or by software dynamically downloaded
and executed in the user’s environment.
Service Provider Evolution. The service indus-
tries are moving toward increased online presence and
using information systems to displace human work-
forces in both service and user support functions.
Software Industry Evolution. Software vendors
increasingly emphasize social applications that sup-
port interaction and collaboration among users, and
also “cloud computing” and SaaS as channels for soft-
ware distribution.
In the context of CNS, the application software ven-
dor and online services industries appear indistin-
guishable. CNS firms are both software vendors
(which seek a profit through leveraging a major com-
petency in software) and service firms (which seek a
profit providing capabilities to consumers). A major
enabler for this industry convergenceis the ubiquitous
Internet and a software platform based on the Web
open standards.
Some informative examples of CNS SP’s include:
LinkedIn (
www.linkedin.com
) is a free-for-use
professional advertising-supported networking ser-
vice. By making use of user-provided content, sub-
scribers can maintain professional contacts, keep in
touch with job opportunities, and seek expert opin-
ion. Subscription-based premium accounts provide
extended functionality.
eBay (
www.ebay.com
) facilitates auctions and sup-
porting community activity for individuals, small
businesses, and enterprises. Users can rate sellers and
buyers, discuss and chat about topics of interest, form
interest groups, and attend online and offline events
and workshops. It charges an auction fee plus a per-
centage of the selling price.
Facebook (
www.facebook.com
) is a free-for-use
social networking service that profits by selling adver-
tising, opinion polls of the membership, and virtual
goods. Users can create networks of “friends”, main-
tain personal profiles, create groups and events, share
photos, and use add-on applications. Third-parties
can deploy extensions utilizing an open API, and host
the extensions on their own servers.
Wikipedia (
en.wikipedia.org
) encourages users
to collaborate on editing articles, and enables them to
view article histories and discuss articles with other
users. The result of these collective volunteer efforts
is a huge and widely available knowledge repository.
CNS is a hotbed of innovation, leveraging the
willingness of consumers (especially young ones) to
take risks and to center their lives in new online-
oriented ways. The “pure” CNS firms that we ob-
served are entrepreneurial startups, while some in-
cumbent e-commerce firms (like Amazon and eBay)
have adopted CNS ideas to enhance their existing
services. Similarly there is an opportunity to adapt
WEB BUSINESS AND DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITIES - Learning from Community Networked Services
547
the best ideas from CNS in various incumbent or-
ganizational and enterprise applications, making the
CNS concepts, techniques, opportunities, and chal-
lenges a topic of larger interest. Business-to-business
(B2B) and enterprise applications are appropriately
more conservative and risk adverse, but many suc-
cesses in CNS can be extended to these domains as
they are qualified as valuable and mature.
6
3 OTHER PERSPECTIVES
There is a wealth of pre-existing research that is rele-
vant to the study of CNS firms.
While the “Web 2.0” (O’Reilly, 2007) concept has
merit in capturing recent large-scale social and tech-
nological developments, its lack of rigorous defini-
tions and overly broad scope limits its applicability
to academic research
7
.
The e-commerce literature has a long tradition in
studying online businesses. Its starting point is of-
ten that e-commerce systems are extensions of firms’
internal information systems into the online medium
with an emphasis on transactions and business pro-
cesses (cf. Alter, 2002; Wareham et al., 2005). A
shortcoming of this approach for CNS is that the
social complexities underlying community activities
that are central to CNS are difficult to characterize in
terms of processes or financial transactions, and re-
quire different analysis techniques
8
. E-services are
an extension of e-commerce from goods to services,
while the focus remains (in our view) within the scope
of B2B and B2C.
Research on virtual communities partially ad-
dresses these shortcomings by studying their nature
and constructs associated with value (cf. Lin and
Lee, 2006). However this literature rarely considers
broader operational and business issues faced by the
SP when their business is predominantly focused on
virtual communities. The knowledge management lit-
6
For instance, features for managing professional net-
works are increasingly utilized within organizations and re-
flected in enterprise software functionality.
7
For instance, the discussion here is generally not ap-
plicable to Web 2.0 firms and applications such as Google
Search, AdSense, and BitTorrent due to our stronger as-
sumptions about the user community. For instance, Google
Search (not a CNS but Web 2.0) identifies central web pages
with a Web crawler and data mining approach, whereas
Wikipedia (both Web 2.0 and strongly a CNS) requires ex-
plicit social interaction among user-authors in its approach
to harnessing collective intelligence.
8
Indeed, the only identifiable business process in some
CNS firms is display advertising and related revenue collec-
tion.
erature identifies organizational knowledge as a po-
tential source of competitive advantage (see the re-
view by Metaxiotis et al., 2005), and this perspective
is relevant to CNS firms. Nonetheless, CNS users re-
side on the vast internet scale rather than within orga-
nizational boundaries and operate on open informa-
tion that has few policies governing its distribution.
Research that accommodatesthese differenceshas be-
gun to emerge (cf. Koh and Kim, 2004).
Literature with a technological orientation (e.g.
software as a service and web information systems) is
highly relevant to CNS, as these technologiesform the
foundation of community interaction and information
access and capture. However in most CNS’s, fairly
generic Web technologies are used
9
.
Nearly all aspects of CNS have either been studied
separately to some extent or fall within the domain of
existing disciplines and research tracks. However it is
the combination of community orientation, value cre-
ation models, and information visibility that together
have operational and business implications worthy of
further inquiry. The reminder of this paper supports
this premise.
4 STAKEHOLDERS AND VALUE
The business environment of a CNS is a particularly
complex one involvingnumerous stakeholders and in-
tricate relationships between value (from whom and
to whom?) and revenues (from whom, and why?).
This section outlines some of these complexities, and
the following section relates them to specific manage-
ment challenges. Some important stakeholders in a
CNS include:
Service Provider. The SP is the designer and major
investor, and defines the functionality of the service
in the process of software and information systems
development and operates a technology platform that
supports the service
10
. The SP underwrites most of
the development and operational costs, and expects a
return on investment.
Users. The users are direct beneficiaries of the
CNS, making use of the functionality and capabili-
ties of the SP and engaging in cooperative activities
with other users. The users typically also provision
9
There are exceptions like Second Life, There, and
World of Warcraft that use other technologies with richer
user interfaces than afforded by the Web, although they pay
a price in target market size by requiring users to install spe-
cial software and to obtain sufficiently powerful hardware.
10
This may also include outsourcing infrastructure to
third parties provisioning and operating “cloud” infrastruc-
ture and performing systems integration.
WEBIST 2009 - 5th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies
548
and administer access devices
11
that are also a critical
part of the technological infrastructure for the service.
Virtual Communities. Assume their own stake-
holder identity in the sense that some actions and out-
comes can be ascribed to the community rather then
individual users
12
.
Third Parties. Include advertisers and outside de-
velopers who develop and support service extensions.
As mentionedearlier, a strong distinguishing char-
acteristic of a CNS is a greater disconnect between
how value is co-created by the various stakeholders
and the sources of revenue. Even though users are
major recipients of value, they typically use the ser-
vice for free
13
. The value they derive is exploited by
the CNS firm to retain these users and attract new ones
and to encourage them to actively use the service. To
increase this value, the CNS firm may explicitly en-
courage extensions or compositions with complemen-
tary services, and may share revenues with developers
and/or providers
14
.
The business model of a CNS firm seeks to con-
vert the various sources of value into revenue. This
is complicated (in comparison to e-commerce, for ex-
ample) in several important respects. While users are
a primary target in the design of the service, they are
often not the major source of revenue. That accrues
to third parties such as advertisers. The effectiveness
of display advertising is enhanced as more informa-
tion is available about the user’s context and inter-
ests. Many CNS’s can provide a considerable amount
of such information to aid the targeting of ads orig-
inating from user profiles, user behavior, and user-
generated content
15
.
A primary focus of the service design is attracting
11
These may include personal computers, smart phones,
game consoles, etc.
12
An example is a poll or a discussion that arrives at a
consensus position representing the conclusion of the com-
munity as a whole rather than individual members.
13
Arguably community orientation has some role in this:
pieces of user-provided content are rarely something users
would pay for, even if they high quality and ample. CNS’s
also often serve non-professional activities, as content cre-
ation is not mandated by an organization.
14
An extension adds capabilities to the CNS, and can
be hosted by the CNS firm or by a third-party provider
(Messerschmitt et al., 2008). A composition occurs when
the extension is itself a fully functioning stand-alone ser-
vice, and often requires extensions to achieve integration
of the two applications. An example extension is a user-
developed application in Facebook and an example compo-
sition is the integration of the interactive globe of Google
Earth that links to other sources of content like Wikipedia
(articles) and Picasa (images).
15
This raises considerable privacy concerns which should
be addressed in the governance policies.
and retaining users, because their activities are usu-
ally at least an indirect source of revenue, and with-
out the users the service would be pointless. The
importance of community to users introduces strong
network externalities (a success-breeds-success phe-
nomenon) and switching costs that discourage users
from moving to competing services
16
. The lack of
formal organizational boarders and information open-
ness act to magnify these effects.
The emphasis (or lack thereof) on extensions and
compositions is a challenging business and design is-
sue involving tradeoffs between the risks of security
holes and poor quality and a possible loosening of
the relationship with users on the one hand, against
the considerable benefits of bringing to bear consid-
erable energy and innovation through complements,
economies of scale, and stronger network externali-
ties on the other.
5 BUSINESS AND IS
There are numerous challenges in managing a CNS
firm. Among the most notable is the difficulty in
defining successful business models in a complex and
changing environment. There are at least three related
issues:
Business Development. focuses on what users ac-
tually want, as opposed to what the entrepreneurs may
have originally conceived.
IS Development. focuses on realizing the function-
ality envisioned for the service, maintaining the func-
tionality as problems arise, and evolving and expand-
ing functionality as additional user needs arise.
User Support. focuses on assisting the users as they
encounter challenges or problems, as well as remov-
ing those challenges or problems as they are identi-
fied.
Our position is that these three classes of business
challenges are more intricately linked, when com-
pared to incumbent online services bearing limited
CNS characteristics. In addition, the very nature of
a CNS opens opportunities to do these things better.
Business and IS development are more intricately
coupled in a CNS for the following reasons:
Connecting Value with Revenue. As described in
Section 4, this connection, which is difficult enough
in incumbent services, is considerably complicated
16
Network externalities (Katz and Shapiro, 1985) refer to
the increase in value that users perceive as the community
grows larger. Switching costs manifest ’lock-in’ (Amit and
Zott, 2001), and they include the perceived disadvantages
(in money, time, and inconvenience and similar factors) in
leaving.
WEB BUSINESS AND DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITIES - Learning from Community Networked Services
549
whenever there is community activity and/or third-
party developers. Thus the design of the service,
which occurs mostly in the course of software require-
ments setting, must take into account a complex set of
priorities (what can we do that will have the biggest
payoff?) and tradeoffs (how should we...?). Espe-
cially in the facilitation of community activity, it is
difficult to anticipate what will be most popular with
users; frequently, minor features may turn out to be
a big win. For example, selling virtual furniture in
Habbo
17
was not an initial feature but has turned out
to be popular among users, and also a new source of
direct revenue.
Capturing User-initiated Innovation. Many if not
most incumbent services are, to a large extent, au-
tomations of existing offline service functions. Ex-
amples include online retail and financial banking and
brokerage. Our observation is that CNS’s are more
likely to set off in entirely new directions, although
this is not universal. Examples include DeviantArt
(an art community) and Twitter (a micro-bloggingser-
vice). A CNS that is most effective in capturing user’s
ideas is likely to be the most successful. The process
of capturing such ideas should actually be an impor-
tant element of service design
18
.
Multi-firm Strategies. Multiple firms can collab-
orate in CNS development (independently or through
acquisitions) by contributing compositions with their
own information repositories and building extensions.
Business tradeoffs in make vs. license decisions in-
herent in extensions and compositions are directly re-
flected in design choices. Beyond this, standardized
vs. proprietary decisions are deeply intertwined with
business and technical considerations.
Governance. Governance mechanisms, privacy
policies, terms and conditions, etc. influence user ac-
ceptance, and hence benefit from user involvement.
Generally these choices must be reflected in coordi-
nated design issues, such as what data is captured and
how it is protected.
Market Dynamics. Like many incumbent online
services, network externalities create an initial obsta-
cle to establishing a critical mass but reward success-
ful services that reach a large market share. These
effects are intensified by the community and infor-
mation openness aspects, and this places more of a
premium on strategies for first-mover positioning. On
the other hand, the presence of the community tends
17
Habbo Hotel (
http://www.habbo.com
) is a virtual
world targeted at a teenage audience.
18
An example of a service that is particularly effective at
this is World of Warcraft. Close monitoring and interaction
with the community helps to tune the game to a balanced
world with innovative user-driven features.
to reward successful services with less churning of the
user base by creating a substantial community-driven
switching cost.
These considerations increase the importance of
business and information systems development in the
success or failure of a CNS firm. However, we be-
lieve they especially place a premium on an integrated
strategy for three aspects of the business: business
and IS development and user support. This conclu-
sion flows mainly from two factors:
Software-mediated User Relationship. In the
CNS’s that we observed, the contact between users
and CNS firm is almost entirely software-mediated,
with (for better or worse) little direct human contact.
This software not only supports the domain-specific
activities of the users but can also (if so designed)
support the capturing of user-initiated innovation and
enable the bulk of the user support function
19
. Thus,
appropriatesoftware design can give a big boost to the
business separately from and in addition to domain-
specific functionality, increasing both effectiveness
and the productivity of human workers (particularly
in the support functions).
SaaS User Support. The SaaS software distribu-
tion model enables the user support function to be
implemented in a particularly effective and efficient
manner. First, the single latest release of the software
is presented to all users simultaneously, greatly reduc-
ing the support burden relative to distribution strate-
gies that leave multiple versions in the users hands
simultaneously. Second, there is an opportunity (if
the software development process is sufficiently ag-
ile) to fix shortcomings and defects quickly and roll
these fixes out to all users quickly. To the extent this
is successful, user support shifts from assisting users
in living with problems to one of continuous improve-
ment and a focus on eliminating problems shortly af-
ter they are identified.
These factors yield an opportunity to “get it right”
in terms of a close coupling of the business develop-
ment and user support functions in information sys-
tems development. The complex of considerations
described in Section 4 are among those that need to
be taken into account in terms of business develop-
ment. Beyond the factors in incumbent online ser-
vices, the community aspects of the application are
similar to collaboration technologies, albeit in a more
specific and customized service context. Consider-
ations like the choice of standardized vs proprietary
solutions and the delegation to extensions and com-
positions also mix technical and business issues.
19
For instance, both members of the user community and
SP employees can post solutions to problems on the ser-
vice’s blogs and discussion boards.
WEBIST 2009 - 5th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies
550
The potential for integrating software development
with customer support, as well as agile characteristics
in the context of a complex functionality and large
user community are also a challenge to the IS devel-
opment processes.
Regardless of the extent to whichthe opportunities
identified here are realized in present CNS firms, the
challenges and opportunities loom large.
6 RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES
As concluded in Section 3, research on the vari-
ous facets of CNS suffer from fragmentation and
loosely defined terminology, and thus fails to holis-
tically address this subset of the “Web 2.0” phe-
nomenon. Therefore, topics related to CNS are a
ripe and promising opportunity for academic research
from which existing and emerging CNS firms could
benefit through improved processes and methodolo-
gies. Specifically, the following are some promising
lines of research:
Empirical Research into CNS Firms. The goal is
to capture and categorize innovations and best prac-
tices from existing CNS firms in areas such as busi-
ness development, software development, and cus-
tomer service, and how they are integrated. The goal
of this research is to better understand these phenom-
ena, to identify opportunities to improve the perfor-
mance of these firms, and to capture best practices
which can be adopted by emerging CNS firms and
non-CNS firms.
IS Development. CNS offers an opportunity to ad-
vance the state of the art methodologies in agile pro-
cesses for software development and coupling this to
SaaS software distribution models. The user commu-
nities for these applications are, relatively speaking,
risk tolerant and amenable to experimentation. There
is also an opportunity to observe and improve pro-
cesses for requirements setting and design decisions
that are tied to business issues in an environment of
strong coupling between business and design
20
.
Incumbent Services. A major issue for research
is the extent to which ideas and methodologies from
CNS can be transferred to a broad range of incumbent
services. This requires expanding our understanding
of how value is created and exploited in CNS.
20
For instance, close collaboration in feature develop-
ment with the most active content contributors can facil-
itate expansion of the shared information repository, and
this serves business purposes by contributing value to other
stakeholders.
7 CONCLUSIONS
Not only are CNS firms at the forefront of innova-
tion in online services, they are an exciting develop-
ment because of the new territory that they explore
in functionality and business and information systems
methodology. An important opportunity presents it-
self to the information systems, software engineering,
and management fields to understand these recent de-
velopments and promulgate them to the broader uni-
verse of online services and web information systems.
REFERENCES
Alter, S. (2002). Information Systems: The Foundation of
E-Business. Prentice Hall.
Amit, R. and Zott, C. (2001). Value creation in e-business.
Strategic Management Journal, 22(6/7):493–520.
Katz, M. L. and Shapiro, C. (Jun 1985). Network external-
ities, competition, and compatibility. The American
Economic Review, 75(3):424–440.
Koh, J. and Kim, Y. G. (2004). Knowledge sharing in vir-
tual communities: an e-business perspective. Expert
Systems with Applications, 26(2):155–166.
Lin, H. F. and Lee, G. G. (2006). Determinants of suc-
cess for online communities: an empirical study. Be-
haviour & Information Technology, 25(6):479–488.
Messerschmitt, D. G., Peltonen, J., Laine, M. O. J., and
Oza, N. (2008). Community networked services:
Learning from Web 2.0. Technical report. Dec.
30, 2008. ISBN: 978-951-22-9734-4.
http://ssrn.
com/abstract=1320947
.
Metaxiotis, K., Ergazakis, K., and Psarras, J. (2005). Ex-
ploring the world of knowledge management: agree-
ments and disagreements in the academic/practitioner
community. Journal of Knowledge Management,
9(2):6–18.
O’Reilly, T. (2007). What is web 2.0: Design patterns
and business models for the next generation of soft-
ware. Communications and Strategies, No. 65, First
quarter:17–37.
Spohrer, J., Vargo, S. L., Caswell, N., and Maglio, P. P.
(2008). The service system is the basic abstraction of
service science. Proceedings of the 41st Hawaii Inter-
national Conference on System Sciences (HICSS).
Vargo, S. L. and Lusch, R. F. (2004). Evolving to a new
dominant logic for marketing. Journal of Marketing,
68(1):1–17.
Wareham, J., Zheng, J., and Straub, D. (2005). Criti-
cal themes in electronic commerce research: a meta-
analysis. Journal of Information Technology, 20:1–19.
WEB BUSINESS AND DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITIES - Learning from Community Networked Services
551