Re: service levels, quality of service, capital asset types inc. social capital [was] RE: em shared vocabulary

Thanks Craig
could be helpful to reference standard definitions of 'service' , not sure
if the health sector is the only one that applies to our domain, but surely
one of them... PDM


On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 4:27 AM, C H <craighubleyca@yahoo.com> wrote:

> If you're looking for definitions for service levels (timeouts, guaranteed
> response times, etc.), you may be best off looking at "service level
> agreements" or SLAs from the IT industry where this field is well defined
> and response times are often guaranteed in extremely short time frames.  If
> humans are not involved then finer-grained "quality of service" (QoS)
> guarantees apply.  (Easy enough to find many good examples by searching).
>
> > capability is composed of various resources but each resource has its own
> > characteristics. The resource doesn’t come in a bundle.
>
> If you're looking for a highest-level abstraction to use to describe every
> possible resource, capital asset type is the most universal I can think of:
>
> - natural (evolved biological system, serving some purpose, e.g. a sand bar
>     preventing hurricane waves from reaching shore, a river yielding water
>     or fish, a forest yielding firewood)
> - financial (liquid negotiable assets exchanged for other kinds of assets)
> - infrastructural/manufactured (something made by humankind, including both
>     infrastructure that moves and which does not, like trucks or roads, if
>     you want you can further differentiate mobile and immobile assets...
>     at least within some time scale in which moving it is impractical, but
>     I would do this by establishing a time span in which it won't move, or
>     differentiate by usage types including medical, legal/military, etc.)
> - human (a human individual, instructional system or social relationships)
>  - individual (the individual human person, viewed as a capital resource)
>  - instructional (explicit instructions many people can follow including
>     technical manuals, warning labels, call scripts, web forms, etc. etc.)
>  - social (neither a body nor a set of bits, the relationships between and
>     around them that permit reliable identification, trust and cooperation
>     even among persons who do not normally share or trade with each other)
>
> Of these, the least easy to characterize is social capital.  So attached is
> London Health Observatory's overview of social capital metrics used in the
> management of Greater London's health promotion, infrastructure investment.
>
> It provides good-enough definitions of the capital asset types as above.
>
>
>