http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/ Paper RSS en-us Wed, 10 Mar 2010 01:47:27 MST Wed, 10 Mar 2010 01:47:27 MST http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/ you@youremail.com you@youremail.com http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=46 Most executives want good service but are constrained by their assumptions about the causes of bad service and the barriers and costs of improvement. Many of these assumptions are dead wrong. The minute management starts questioning their assumptions and asking questions, the logjam can be broken and innovation and improvement ensue. http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=45 Decisions in service operations are complex since they involve various interdependent decision-makers agents) at different hierarchical levels, ranging from customer representatives over account managers to top executives. We formulate a three-level maintenance service problem as a stochastic decision-making model, with an account manager, supervisor, and worker at each of the three levels. The proposed incentive mechanism aligns the interests of lower level agents with the goals of the top agent. The agents’ strategic interactions are analyzed game-theoretically and results show that a Pareto-efficient Nash equilibrium can be attained given certain organizational properties. Furthermore, we show that local information can be sufficient for organization-wide optimal decisions. In a final step, the three-level model is generalized for multi-level, i.e., multi-organizational-scale, systems. http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=41 The continuous growth of health care services expenses urges U.S. government to take actions. The adoption of Information Technology, and especially RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) allow hospitals to re-engineer their processes in order to reduce costs, maintaining the same level of service to the patients. Information technology represents a core element of the service itself; therefore a scientific driven service design approach is believed to improve the adoption rate of RFID in hospitals. The main goal of the present study is to propose an RFID based service platform for hospitals, which is consistent with a service science driven design approach. A survey of 33 California based hospitals has been used to identify the user requirements of the hospitals. Later, a business process re-engineering for hospitals is proposed. Firstly the different actors involved in the health care services, along with their relationships in terms of information flows, are identified. This leads us to identify the various operations in a hospital setting that have a potential to be streamlined by introducing RFID technology. Having introduced these operations, we theorize a customizable RFID service, which can be implemented sequentially by each hospital according to its individual conditions such that it suits them most. http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=40 Education is a service industry comprising 10 percent of the US GDP, second only to health care at 17 percent. In the U.S. and over much of the world, classroom education remains a labor-intensive craft profession, essentially unchanged since the 19th Century... In summary, there are important stirrings in education, the World’s most important service sector. These go far beyond the ‘time and motion’ improvements of typical IE/OR studies and can extend into the classroom and into the learning process in new and transformational ways. But there remains much to be done. We hope that you find time to join the effort! http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=39 Contemporary information systems (IS) products and services must fulfill the needs of consumers that are more widely scattered than traditional organizational end-users. New ways to incorporate these wide-audience end-users in the IS development are required. The lead-user method used in new product development is a promising approach to tackle this problem. However, the finding and recruiting of the lead-users has been found very burdensome for the firms. We propose lead-users to be found and recruited from virtual communities. This paper provides a conceptual framework that makes use of the Internet’s possibilities – not only in recruiting the lead users - but also when collaborating with them utilizing distributed Group Support Systems. Finally, we report on our preliminary field tests, discuss the implications of our work and conclude. http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=38 Cloud software service is a modality for providing computer facilities and deploying software via the Internet. The concept combines Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Cloud computing represents a contextual shift in how computers are provisioned and accessed. Software-as-a-service is an architectural continuum that represents a democratization of access to software, computing platforms, and data through network effects, and the monetization of its value to customers and end users. One of the defining characteristics of cloud software service is the transfer of control from the client domain to the service provider. Another is that the client benefits from economy of scale on the part of the provider. There are many different examples of cloud software service, and this paper seeks to combine the salient elements into a composite picture of the subject matter. http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=37 We introduce the concept of structural analysis of a business enterprise. The practice of enterprise structural analysis amounts to the construction of an enterprise model using business entities defined in an enterprise ontology or enterprise architecture and creating specific views of the enterprise based on relationships among the entities. As we demonstrate through a simple yet illustrative example of a hypothetical coffee shop business, these views can provide many insights and points of analysis. Structural analysis provides an interactive, analytical environment for a user to view an enterprise from multiple perspectives, an approach not unlike On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) but for analyzing the qualitative or structural aspects of the enterprise. http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=33 In a recent article in this Journal, S. Vargo, the service-dominant logic theorist, makes the unarguable claim that “What is needed is a true science of service (Vargo and Akaka, Service Science, 2009, p. 39, emphasis in original). To constitute a true science of service, services research must use valid measures. The sine qua non requirement for a valid measure is content validity, which comprises item-content validity and answer-scale validity (see Rossiter, International Journal of Research in Marketing, 2002, and C-OAR-SE Construct Measurement for the Social Sciences, Springer, forthcoming). The present article begins by criticizing the content validity of E-S-QUAL (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Malhotra 2005), the principal academic measure of e-retailer service quality, which is probably the most important construct in contemporary services research. Rossiter’s (2002) C-OAR-SE construct measurement theory is then applied to develop a new and more valid measure, called ER-SERVCOMPSQUAL. This new measure seeks potential customers’ and current customers’ judgments about the quality of the components of e-retail service (thus ensuring high item-content validity), which are rated in terms of behavioral answer categories (which have high answer-scale validity). The new measure clearly shows e-retail managers where to make improvements in their service quality. http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=32 The shift in many industrial economies from manufacturing to service may have implications for the extant understanding of value creation. Service-dominant logic (SDL) poses a new paradigm for understanding the basis of economic exchange and argues that service is a true basis for understanding value creation. This service-centered perspective, as opposed to a goods-centered perspective, argues that market exchange actually is the process of parties using their specialized operant knowledge for mutual benefit, and focuses on how providers and customers interact, in order to co-create value. Using the SDL paradigm, this paper examines service-oriented entrepreneurship, where new business opportunities can be identified from the value co-creation perspective that may have been otherwise unnoticed by the goods-centered view. Propositions are developed using literature on SDL and entrepreneurship. Next, secondary cases from four companies are offered which support linkages between SDL and: (1) the identification of entrepreneurial opportunities, (2) a lifetime view of products/services, (3) redefining the role of the customer, (4) the alignment of information and goals between firms and their customers, and (5) the dynamic recombination of actors in the value creation system. Finally, the paper includes discussion and conclusion sections. http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=31 We present an open systems model that describes the processes and systems whose cumulative effects shape the human side of service delivery. The human side of service delivery, we believe, has received less attention in the service science literature than the more technical side. The open systems view of consumer service organizations focuses on input, throughput, and output stages. The creation and maintenance of a service climate is the key issue for throughput management practices in the model, such climate being partially dependent on employee and customer attributes as input and in turn linking to the output of the firm in the form of customer satisfaction and profits. A shared service climate across the subsystems of organizations—all subsystems (e.g., information technology, finance, HR, marketing) for all organizational members regardless of rank or position (e.g., executives, front-line supervisors, staff who serve service delivery people, and service delivery people themselves) is seen as the key to managing the complexities of the human side of service delivery if the firm is to be competitive in the marketplace. http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=30 Customers deserve better service than most service organizations are prepared or willing to provide them. This article describes the historical trends leading relentlessly to liberating service customers. The 21st century is portrayed as the customer century where respecting and trusting customers, serving the unserved and under served, and improving overall service levels become paramount. The implications for customer co-creation are explored. Technology enabled customer co-creation is also examined. Finally, the customer perspective is presented as the appropriate and necessary perspective for the service sector to adopt as customers are liberated or they liberate themselves. http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=28 An interactive method for service design has been proposed for service that heavily depends on human expertise and human performance. In this method a simulation model of the service process is to be constructed based on ethnographic field observation, and then the model is to be validated by showing simulation results to field experts in a visualized form. In the course of proposing and assessing design plans, opinions are repeatedly acquired from field experts by showing simulation results. Their expertise can be reflected in the final design plan through such an interactive design process. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed design method, the method was applied to ground aircraft operations at a large airport. A simulation model of the service process at the Tokyo International (Haneda) Airport was constructed, and it was demonstrated that the simulation could well replicate observed data on ground aircraft operations. It was also shown that the proposed design method is useful to create new design plans for ground aircraft operations and comparatively assess them for improving service performance. http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=27 This article focuses on analysis of the human aspect in service systems and investigates the role of creativity in enhancing service innovation. Applying the creative cognition approach, a conceptual framework of creative process for service development is constructed to demonstrate the general process of designing creative services, with the emphasis on consumer satisfaction and business success. Five strategies are proposed to facilitate creative service generation: abstraction and multi-perspective, conceptual expansion, conceptual combination, analogical thinking, and meta-design. Concrete examples are provided to illustrate the application of the general creative service design process and the proposed strategies. http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=24 Success of services businesses depend on how well the workforce is managed. Having the right size of workforce and the right skill set of the workforce at the right time under dynamic demand environments are challenges that many service businesses face. Demand disturbances in services businesses are typically managed by adjusting the resource levels such as acquiring additional resources from larger pool (borrowing resources from the corporate levels for departmental level needs), and releasing resources back to the larger pool for transferring and cross training of the workforce. However, the resource adjustments for changing the level of workforce are not as easy as acquiring or scraping materials as in manufacturing supply chain. Ineffective policies of the resource adjustment can produce undesirable effects such as oscillation between acquisition and release of workforce, and amplified oscillation through the stages of the service processes. In this work, we attempt to apply control theoretic principles in managing resources to see how various feedback control schemes can improve costs, utilization and stability of workforce. Our study indicates that effective combination of multiple feedback control schemes can produce desirable policies of workforce resource management. http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=20 In order to meet the ever-increasing demands of the market place, many organisations have sought to become more agile and flexible. One potential route to increased flexibility is home working. In a services dominant world what is less well considered, however, is the impact of such flexible work practices on co-workers, partners and customers. Some of the human resource management literature provides a positive stance, where both employee and employer benefit from home working arrangements, whereas as other studies have challenged and questioned the practice and suggest that the benefits of home working have been overstated. This paper draws on results of a case study investigation to appraise, for the various stakeholders, the benefits and costs of homeworking. http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=19 Service science is a big umbrella under which many new and traditional results can find their comfortable places... Connected, interdependent value cocreation is networking: the dynamic multiple connections of people, organizations, resources, and institutions as service systems which may scale down to persons, up to the whole economy, and transformational to new production functions and value chains. If we understand this networking, then we may be able to see through the business strategies and system design laws that optimize connected value cocreation. http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=17 Emmanuel Fragnière, a Professor at Haute Ecole de Gestion de Genève, shows in this editorial column that the Taylor organizational model, which originated in the industrial world, no longer has a place in today’s service sector. In fact, the modern service sector is actually less standardized, and has begun to incorporate specific expertise and skills more and more heavily. This evolution supposes a different organizational model that relies more on creativity and on “implicit knowledge, ” which is the essence of expertise. This new organizational model, which is starting to be sketched out in certain larger service enterprises, has yet to be fully created. http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=16 Abstract -- Service is broadly considered as an application of specialized knowledge, skill, and experience, performed for co-creation of respective values of both consumer and provider. Services are engineered and delivered through a heterogeneous service system. Compared to physical goods in manufacturing, resources, largely people (end users as the service consumer and employees as the service provider) - the main focus of a service system, cannot be held and are more complex to model and manage as people participating in service production and consumption have physiological and psychological issues, cognitive capability, and sociological constraints, etc. As the world becomes more complex and uncertain socially and economically, this research proposes a computational thinking approach to modeling of the dynamics and adaptiveness of a service system, aimed at fully leveraging today’s ubiquitous digitalized information, computing capability and computational power so that the service system can be studied qualitatively and quantitatively. Ultimately, with this foundation we will successively and successfully develop the following mechanisms to implement and enhance service systems: • A mechanism to timely capture end users’ requirements, changes, expectation and satisfaction in a variety of technical, social, and cultural aspects; • A mechanism to efficiently and cost-effectively provide employees right means and assistances to engineer services while promptly responding the changes; • A mechanism to allow involved people consciously infuse as much intelligence as possible into all levels and aspects of decision-making to assure necessary system adaptiveness for smarter operations. http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=14 Abstract -- Service science is an emerging discipline concerned with the evolution, interaction, and reciprocal cocreation of value among service systems. Service-dominant (S-D) logic is an alternative to the traditional, goods-dominant (G-D) paradigm for understanding economic exchange and value creation. This service-centered view is based on the idea that service – the application of competences for the benefit of another – is the basis of all exchange. S-D logic has been identified as an appropriate philosophical foundation for the development of service science. However, perhaps partly because S-D logic is first necessarily encountered through the G-D logic paradigm to which it runs counter, it is sometimes misinterpreted and thus misrepresented. This paper discusses S-D logic as a foundation for service science by reviewing the foundational premises of S-D logic and clarifying several misinterpretations related to 1) the S-D logic meaning of “service”, 2) the idea that all economies are service economies, and 3) the nature of value cocreation. Drawing on these clarifications, implications of an S-D logic foundation for service science are proposed. http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=13 Abstract -- The Energy Box is proposed as a 24/7 background processor operating on a local computer or in a remote location, silently managing one’s home or small business electrical energy usage hour-by-hour and even minute-by-minute. It operates best in an environment of demand-sensitive real-time pricing, now made feasible via ‘smart grid’ technology. We assume that, in time, virtually every electrical device in a home or small business will be controllable from the Energy Box. There are multiple motivations for an Energy Box: (1) By delaying or pushing forward various uses of electricity (e.g. space conditioning), widespread use of the Energy Box could ‘shave the peaks and fill in the valleys of demand,’ thereby reducing the need for capacity expansion in electrical power generation and distribution; (2) The system should result in reduced electrical energy costs to the consumer; (3) The system supports local generation, storage and sale of electricity back to the grid; (4) The system supports graceful reductions in power consumption by allowing voluntary partial load shedding as requested by the electrical utility during times of extreme high demand; (5) Requiring numerous minute-by-minute decisions over the course of a day, the system alleviates the home owner or small business manager from making such decisions, each only involving pennies but in the aggregate involving significant dollars. The primary integrating method of optimization and control is stochastic dynamic programming. http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=11 Abstract -- Service scaling is concerned with service productivity, and hyper-networks with the design of service scaling. This new model uniquely explains Internet-based economic activities, such as e-commerce/e-business and social networking, which are quintessential new genres of service for Knowledge Economy. These activities possess unprecedented promises for scaling: up (reaching the population), down (personalization), and transformational (new business designs). The concept of hyper-networks has been proposed recently by one of the authors to help explain the analytical nature of such scaling. It establishes the principle of designing multiple simultaneous layers of digital connections (networking) of persons and organizations on the same basic networks (e.g., the Internet), and interrelating them through “value worm holes” to inflate value propositions (business spaces) and enable massive, simultaneous value cocreations across the life cycles of persons and organizations. This paper further analyzes the mathematical properties of hyper-networks in the context of a person’s multiple roles in his/her life cycle, where each role sparks a particular network. Agent-based simulation experiments confirm that multi-layered networking (e.g., simultaneous multiple social networks) decreases exponentially the degrees of separation, and thereby increases the possibility for value proposition and cocreation in the community. http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=9 Abstract -- Facility Network Transformation (FNT) is a strategic approach involving assessing and optimizing the industrial facility networks such as new site selection, demand forecasting, performance evaluation in those customer oriented service industries, e.g. banking, retail, etc. In practice, FNT requirements are often diverse, dynamic and industry specific, it\'s often difficult to implement a generic FNT service fully integrated with legacy systems. The heterogeneity of spatial information further calls for a loosely coupled architecture. An innovative spatial decision support system, iFAO (Intelligent Facility Network Analytics and Optimization), is therefore developed based on Service Oriented Architecture for FNT problems. In this paper, key FNT service patterns are identified and modeled to develop an industrial independent solution, and an SOA-based framework for iFAO is proposed correspondingly. An underlying data model design is also elaborated which acts as a common language for experts from different domains to communicate and help speed up the solution development. With a real implementation case in retail, it\'s illustrated how the SOA based iFAO services are integrated to solve the real industrial problems, especially for quick decisions on business strategy in the competitive and ever-changing marketplaces. http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=8 Abstract -- As part of an ongoing study of the similarities and differences between the Goods and Services Sectors of the economy, a technique labelled “Data Surface Mining” (DSM) was used to analyze three independently generated and previously published data sets that focused on three different aspects of human resources. The three aspects are: in which economic sector to launch a career (young people), the relative presence of powerful women in the two sectors (women) and the relative presence of seniors in top positions in the two sectors (aging). Such matters are of major managerial significance in light of the fact that the Services Sector represents 80% (GDP and/or employment) of the United States economy and is of increasing importance in the global economy. http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=7 It becomes essential for us to develop a revolutionary science capable of helping enterprises invest effectively to capitalize on a competitive and adaptable configuration of service systems under uncertain circumstance, aimed at accordingly realizing more predicable outcomes in a smart, efficient, and cost-effective way. Apparently, as the world is getting better instrumented and interconnected, and more intelligent, it is of a great need for service systems to be studied using computational thinking, resulting in the creation and development of service science with the potential of much broader applicability. http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=4 Abstract -- This study investigates the possible spillover effects of customer satisfaction from product manufacturer to service provider, and vice versa. The survey results provide empirical evidence for the presence of spillover effects of quality and customer satisfactions in the mobile phone industry. This finding suggests that research on the ways in which quality affects customer satisfaction and loyalty should consider the influence of partnering firms and suppliers, rather than only examine the relationship within the same organization. This is particularly relevant in settings where the simultaneous presence of physical product and the service are needed. In the mobile phone industry, handset manufacturers and network operators need to consider whom they partner, depending whether they are the likely receiving or giving party of the spillover effects. Moreover, these effects are moderated by product image gap between the handset and network operator. http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=3 Abstract -- We have conducted survey research to measure the perception of the Genevese population regarding the problem of information overload. The sample size is 581. Main findings indicate that information overload is a real concern in Geneva and seems to affect the efficiency of companies. Themes like sources and mediums of communications, utility of information, information pollution are investigated. In the first part of the analysis, we propose descriptive statistics. In the second part we explore a few hypotheses that are tested. http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=2 As the nations, businesses, non-profits, and people of the world become more interdependent, value creation and conflict resolution mechanisms, both historically evolved and consciously designed, are becoming more diverse, complex, and unfortunately, more susceptible to cascade failures and the law of unintended consequences. Service science is emerging as the study of value-cocreation phenomena in a globally integrated and connected world, which has the potential to become significantly smarter and more sustainable. In a service world, diverse entities create, abandon, utilize, ignore, configure, reconfigure, specialize, integrate, protect, and share resources and relationships to cocreate benefits with and for each other, both as individuals and collectives, both for the short-term and the long-term. ... http://www.sersci.com/ServiceScience/paper_details.php?id=1 Service cannot be held, and is typically intangible, perishable, difficult to port, hard to measure, and co-produced with customers. This paper introduces a new thinking of design and deployment of competent and competitive service systems by taking account of these service’s unique characteristics. It aims to help promote and advance Service Science that ultimately will empower enterprise service systems and make them highly adaptable and sustainable to the global, changing, and dynamic service environment (when, where and who to deliver and whom to be served, etc.) to meet the severe competition challenges.