Glenn Charles Parry

Commercial farmers are under increasing pressure to collect data for decision-making, regulatory compliance, and reporting down the supply chains. These data demands are intensifying, as societal pressures grow for greater sustainability, food safety, and accountability. While manual data collection is common, the process is increasingly automated using sensors. Services frequently employ specific interfaces, and collected data is recorded into many, often proprietary databases, limiting interoperability. The result is overwhelming complexity for farmers, duplication of effort, missed opportunities to access and compare different datasets, and potential regulatory and competitive failings. Tensions exist between the business models of agricultural service providers and the farmers they support. These need to be surfaced and addressed if the sector is to fully benefit from digitalization. Web3.0 technologies and protocols – in particular distributed systems – may offer some opportunities as they provide data interoperability, tools to address data ownership issues, edge computing, and decentralized data. With illustrative case examples from New Zealand farms, this chapter identifies some of the key barriers that need to be addressed and critically discusses how digital innovation and adoption may be accelerated in farming systems.

When moving towards digitally enabled advanced services, firms are faced with the challenge of servicing heterogeneous customer requirements that emerge during product use. Whereas offers may have been designed with fixed functionality and a focus on stable outcomes, in the advanced service environment providers must respond to a variety of demands emergent from multiple contexts of use. Using a case example from healthcare, this chapter illustrates that adopting a modular systems approach to a firm's offer enhances its ability to meet customers' heterogeneous requirements in use. The chapter shows that through the application of modularity, in combination with digital and material technology, products can have the flexibility to absorb variety in use. Modularity and digitisation permit the binding of form and function to be postponed until requirements emerge in use, allowing the organisation to quickly tailor the offering to emergent demand.

Service value is realized within the interaction of client and provider, and the Enterprise Image (EI) creates a picture of a moment in time of the working relationship. The EI focuses on a contractual relationship between two parties and identifies the resources used and who controls them. The resources included in the image are those that are required to achieve the outcome desired from a client/provider interaction. The approach has been applied to many different operations, for example, service maintenance, product provision, and consulting. EIs have proven useful in management decision making, service development, communication, and understanding complex enterprises.