When Touch Cannot Be Digitized: ArchiMate Enterprise Architecture for Omnichannel Wellness Services

Abstract

Wellness providers such as massage studios are digitalizing their booking, membership, and home-visit channels, yet the service they sell still happens through a therapist's hands, a condition that omnichannel services and phygital services research, grown largely out of retailing, rarely translates into architectural specification. This study designs an enterprise architecture for a micro-enterprise wellness services provider in Banten, Indonesia, that plans three channels, namely regular on-site massage, monthly membership, and home service. Following design science research and TOGAF ADM phases A to D, six ArchiMate models were developed and then analysed through a digitizability lens that classifies every touchpoint as fully digitizable, digitally mediated, or irreducibly physical. Five of the nine normalized activities are fully digitizable and every one of them is information handling, two are digitally mediated, and the two irreducibly physical activities, the therapist's travel and the massage itself, appear in none of the six models. That omission is precisely what makes a distinct family of frictions architecturally invisible. Twelve anticipated frictions are therefore separated into boundary frictions, which exist because the service is physical, and generic digital frictions. The resulting target architecture surrounds the physical activity with an information envelope of identity assurance, shared availability, arrival status, and safety tracing. What cannot be digitized can still be surrounded by information that reduces uncertainty. The artifact is evaluated analytically and ex ante, no implementation exists yet, and systematic measurement is the necessary next step.

GS Cited Analysis