Exploring Potential Impacts of Self-Sovereign Identity on Smart Service Systems

Self-sovereign identity (SSI) is a new paradigm, which puts users back in control of their own digital identity. This does not only strengthen the position of the users but implies new interaction schemes that may improve interoperability and usability. Smart services systems enable the integration of resources and activities and use smart products as boundary objects. As such systems typically involve digital interactions between multiple actors, it can be assumed that utilising SSI has a positive impact on them. To investigate how these potential improvements manifest themselves, we investigate electric vehicle charging as example of a smart service system. At the core of our conceptual analysis is the service process, which we extract from a reference model. Based on a SWOT analysis, we identify areas for transformation and derive an SSI-enabled interaction model for an electric vehicle charging service. The evaluation of the new process shows that SSI can reduce complexity of integration with partners and can provide a better customer experience through simplified registration and authentication. Moreover, SSI might even lead to the disintermediation of actors in the service system. Although SSI is still emerging, our findings underline its relevance as a mechanism to establish trust in smart service systems through the seamless and standardised integration of digital identities for humans, organisations, and things.