A Control Theoretical Model of Web Service Value Development

Abstract

This paper describes a control theoretical model of collaborative value development. This model is designed to assist managers in choosing parameters that are critical to the development process in service design and support their Business Model. This methodology uses control system modelling of web-based service value generation implemented in SIMULINK/MATLAB. An application based on public domain Wikipedia data is used to validate and develop the model. A control theoretic model applied to the creation of Wikipedia articles shows very good agreement with Wikipedia published data for the time dependent growth in articles produced, and editors used, well within the variability of parametric data listed publically justifying the principle equations used in the model. This development and fine tuning of the model has been limited by the publically available data. To obtain a more accurate model in this area would need the co-operation of web service organisations to reveal confidential data. This modelling procedure can produce a decision support process for service design and could, with modification be applied much more widely to other choices in service design/implementation, even allowing for user contribution to be evaluated. This work shows how subjective judgements on value and other intangibles need to be continually re-evaluated. Such methodology has not been applied elsewhere to value generation applications. It could be used to rank contributions from co-creators for reward sharing.