Exploring Services Science

The study of the organizational impact of information technology services on the value generation process in organizations has a story that spans over several decades. In this stream of research, that goes under the name of IT value, scholars debated over years on the potential existence of a positive link between the presence of IT services and the organizational performance. The field of IT value is ample and continuous. Considering these aspects this paper contributes to the literature by proposing a quantitative analysis of the IT value literature. Our study complements existing studies on the value of IT services, which followed qualitative approaches, focusing on the summarization and systematization of existing literature. This paper presents the results of a longitudinal bibliometric study of the IT value literature based on 435 papers published from 1990. Our analysis shows a growing trend of publications and citations, the existence of a common theoretical foundation for the research stream identified by the most influential and co-cited sources. Our analysis identified the existence of three core research areas inside which most of the IT value discourse is developed. We concluded our research formulating some considerations regarding future IT service value investigations.

Blockchain technology is expected to revolutionize the way transactions are performed, thereby affecting a vast variety of potential areas of application. While expectations are high, real world impact and benefit are still unclear. To be able to assess its impact, the first structured literature review of peer-reviewed articles is conducted. As blockchain technology is centered around a peer-to-peer network, enabling collaboration between different parties, the service system is chosen as unit analysis to examine its potential contribution. We have identified a set of characteristics that enable trust and decentralization, facilitating the formation and coordination of a service system.

Digital fabrication is contributing to the paradigm shift that is determining a new way to design, produce and consume goods and services. In order to understand the role of FabLabs, networked platforms for the dissemination of digital culture through the sharing of technological tools and knowledge, this paper explores the main research themes and methods associated with this new business model. Through a systematic literature analysis, it provides an assessment of the state of art of the past and current literature about FabLabs from a service perspective. Based on research papers published exclusively on scholarly journals, the study describes the emergence of this research area and characterize its current status. A critical analysis of the existing research as well as some recommendations for future studies in this field are also offered.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the landscape of workplace health promotion applications. We analyze the contributions that consider this type of apps and their use. Therefore, the published research is summarized by a literature review presenting an overview. The findings are categorized in various clusters. As a result, it was possible to see major research streams described in literature. Furthermore, the results show a need for future research on app development for workplace health promotion.

This article aims to investigate organizational synergies in the omni-channel service context. In doing so, it discloses new omni-channel trends and discusses its implications for managers and academics. It uses a qualitative multi-method approach, which includes more than one method of collecting data to generate comprehensiveness and rich knowledge, namely: a systematic literature review and a case study. The transition to an omni-channel service requires companies to overcome many organizational challenges and is compelling academics and practitioners to focus on its operations management. The results indicate that organizational synergies are changing the omni-channel landscape and may provide several opportunities for gaining competitive advantages by implementing new technologies (e.g. m-payments), and anticipating customer needs (e.g. multi-brand experience). It is possible that these organizational synergies are transcending the omni-channel concept, creating new trends, but to confirm this hypothesis further investigation is needed.

New Software Development techniques with respect to cloud computing and eServices had modified IS architectures which were well established and consolidated in the past. The new methodologies of (software, micro/e) “Services” has pushed towards the adoption of software development organization independent from traditional tiered-architecture with the result of reducing both scale-up and down times as well as interruption times due to migration to different platforms. The eServices development organization relays on MicroServices architecture so that it is decomposing the legacy architecture in micro-components, each one with an independent life-cycle but interconnected and correlated, i.e. eServices. Each eService is hosted within a single container which has a proper software lifecycle and with minimal set of executable operating system libraries. The analysis goes into details about the structure and the development of eServices with MicroServices architecture. The paper discusses the new technological tendencies under the lens of an Organizational approach.

The study advances the debate on the co-creation of value in healthcare by treating the informal caregivers as a key organizational resource for the providers. Using the Dialogue, Access, Risk, and Transparency (DART) model developed by Prahalad and Ramaswamy as an interpretative key, this qualitative paper frames the role of the informal caregivers within the multiple experiences of value co-creation in which they are engaged. The central argument is that the informal caregiver performs three intersecting key roles: patient’s advocate, system navigator and coordinator of care.

Understanding the impact of corruption in modern societies, namely in standard of living, health and education services, is an issue that has attracted increased attention in recent years. This paper examines the relationship between the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) provided by Transparency International and the Human Development Index (HDI) of the United Nations Development Program and its components. The analysis is done for clusters of countries with similar levels of development. For the countries with high levels of development, it was found a negative relationship between corruption and human development. Moreover, for these countries, higher corruption levels are related to poor health care services, poor education services and low standard of living. For the other clusters of countries, these relationships were not statistically significant. The results obtained reinforce the importance of efforts by international politicians and organizations in fighting corruption, particularly in highly developed countries, to promote development.

The purpose of this study is to extend research on social networking sites and the role of these tools on business performance of service firms. To date, there has been little investigation of the contribution of these tools in order to identify the opportunities for improving business performance. Using cross-section data from a sample in Romania, we empirically investigated the mediating effects of service innovation on the relationship between social networking sites and business performance. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was used to perform reliability and validity checks, and structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to test the research model. The findings fill the gap in the literature by demonstrating social networking sites influence the collaboration, ideas and knowledge sharing among employees, customers, and business partners, leading to growth the business performance. The results also indicate that innovation capability played a key role on business performance but its mediating role between social networking sites and business performance of service firms was not confirmed. Finally, the theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

A conceptual model helps to know, understand, communicate and make simulations on the kind of objects that it represents. Although the main concepts of service science have been deeply discussed by many authors, their conceptual modelling is lacking. Therefore, in this paper, we progressively model the concept of service system, which is incontestably the fundamental element of service science. We define and depict the generic components of service systems as well as the relations between them. We also apply the recursion principle in order to model more complex service systems, i.e., service systems composed of other services systems. The key contribution of this work, i.e., the conceptual model of a generic service system, will help researchers and practitioners to argue on service systems as well as on their key components and relations.

The diffusion of web-based technologies has transformed the today consumers, shifting them from mere users to content generators, able to influence each other’s opinions and choices. Such trend discloses important consequences for firms, products and brands. In order to support strategic and operational decision-making, this study frames the phenomenon of social media marketing into the value co-creation paradigm and shows how to design an analytical framework combining performance management and System Dynamics.

Creative Industries have largely contributed to employment, GDP growth and social cohesion, even during recent economic crises. Despite their relevance, there is a lack for monitoring the impacts, especially for new technologies involved into their business. The paper aims to appraise it when specifically related to the use of Big Data. It evaluates the considerable economic benefit on creative business performance linked to exploiting vast new flows of information. A multi-criteria methodology for assessing these effects on Creative Industries, and a model for implementing business performance through collaborative and virtual value chains are presented. The model shows positive spillovers resulting from the collaboration among Digital Creative Industries usually in the fields of innovation, technology and intellectual property benefitting from Big Data applications, distinguishing a macro from a microeconomic level of effectiveness, since transforming data into captured value for the firms, despite their size and volume capacity, increases business performance.

Service business models expose industrial service providers to an increasing amount of uncertainties. In order to design profitable offerings, providers need to understand how uncertainties affect contract profitability. Both, access to data and algorithms are key requirements for accurate analyses.While current research focuses on developing algorithms to derive insights from data that already exist, the need for strategically acquiring relevant data sets has been neglected so far. In this article, we develop a method for defining data acquisition strategies to improve uncertainty analyses for industrial service contracting. We explain how lacking observations, variables and quality of data affect uncertainty analyses, propose data acquisition strategies as a systematic plan to acquire relevant data and develop an approach for ranking acquisition strategies by measuring their acquisition effort and business benefit.The method is applied in an industrial use case to demonstrate its benefit for assessing cost uncertainties in full-service repair contracts.

Value creation with data science methodologies generates important insights. However, these insights do not systematically provide service value to customers. Therefore, we show a systematic approach to use data science for the process of service design. We develop a structure of data science methodologies in the dimensions of their potential to create service benefit. This enables the mapping of the value contribution of the data science tools on the different perspectives and phases of the service design process. Based on this mapping, a direct link can be established between the outcomes of the data science methodologies and the value drivers for the customer. The resulting new methodology allows the systematic value creation from insights generated by data science.

The introduction of new technologies creates the pursuit for innovative business models. In order to compare and evaluate such models in new markets, business model patterns can support the provision of new insights. However, so far there is no agreed upon transparent approach that helps to identify these patterns. Based on a combination of established statistical methods we propose a systematical approach that allows to identify business model patterns of any given domain. In order to validate the approach, we apply it on a data set of 58 e-mobility projects and as a result identify five distinct and semantically meaningful business models types. This paper contributes on the one hand by suggesting a new approach to identify different patterns of business models and on the other hand provides a valuable insight of the current state of e-mobility service business models that can further drive the adoption.

Communication between actors in a service system can be based on unstructured text. The quality of this text is crucial for the effort and output of a service system. The paper presents an approach to evaluate and model the quality by using requirements from automotive development projects as practical example. The aim is to define quality by using relevant attributes and quantifiable measures. First results include the development of an assessment tool and an initial analysis of the available dataset.

Keeping up a high level of primary care services for a whole country or even a federal state is a very challenging task due to the demographic change and many other reasons, also for Germany. In the future it is expected that even more general practitioners (GP) are necessary to cover close to come healthcare. Therefore, an efficient use of resources and an optimized planning is crucial. Mathematical models and approaches can help facing the challenge by determining optimal locations for practices, shift schedules or appointment strategies, for example. To use these in practice, decision support systems (DSS) are necessary that link the input data to the approaches and display the results. The outline of such a decision support system for optimally locating GP practices is presented in this paper.

Currently, many libraries, either academic or public, possess information systems to support their operations. Although libraries are becoming more aware of the potential of data analytics in supporting library management decisions, there is still a long way to go to take plenty advantage of the information collected. This paper proposes a prescriptive analytics solution to enhance the service provided by libraries, by optimizing libraries layout. The quantitative method introduced aims to identify layout configurations that minimize the time spent by clients in picking books from the library. A new multi-floor layout optimization algorithm is developed, based on the pairwise exchange method heuristic. A real data sample of approximately 66.000 loans, taken from the information system of a European Engineering School’s library, was analyzed and processed. The method proposed was used to improve the library’s current departments configuration, achieving an improvement of 13.2% in terms of walking distance to collect the books. The results corroborate the effectiveness of the method proposed and its potential in supporting library management decisions.

We present a longitudinal project using action design research, which is a four-year collaboration between two EPFL entities: The research Laboratory for Systemic Modeling (LAMS) and EPFL’s IT department, called the VPSI. During that time the VPSI was going through a transformation into a service-oriented organization. The research project began as an open-ended modeling of some of the VPSI processes. It slowly matured into the design and development of a visualization tool we call service cartography. During this research, we learned that, to successfully apply service-orientation, focusing purely on IT architecture and end-customer value is not enough. Attention must be given to the exchange of internal services between the service organization members and their alignment with the services expected by the external stakeholders. In this paper we present the evolution of (1) our understanding of what services are, and (2) our conceptualization of how the service cartography facilitates the service-oriented thinking.

A first goal of this paper is to determine what customers do value when choosing a hotel or having an experience with it and with what intensity they value these elements. Secondarily, the paper aims to identify sources of value creation in the hotel environment. For the purpose of this paper, the added value is understood as ability of the hotel to incorporate customers’ feedback in its decisions that are affecting them and the choices they make. To achieve its goals, the paper employs content analysis. The paper provides valuable insights to hoteliers, which support their decisions to improve the business by incorporating proactively strategies of value creation.

Experience economy is the last segment in the growth of economic value. After the appearance of services and the quality assurance culture, experience design and management point to experience quality as the new way to assess what the customer really values. Focusing on tourism industry, the present article compares a wide sample of tourists’ numerical scores and verbal assessments, analyzed with a sentiment analysis engine. The objective is to acquire a deeper knowledge of the concept of experience quality to find out what the tourist really values.

The paper analyses the evolution of convergence in higher education during 2002–2013, based on previously used macroeconomic and transition indicators: Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, Research and Development (R&D) investment level, government expenditure on education (% of GDP), share of exports of high-tech in total manufactured exports, costs of exploiting intellectual property. We resort to cluster analysis to identify and characterize main groups of higher education systems in Europe. Using forecasting techniques for the 2014–2020 period, we foresee the dynamics of the previously outlined clusters, and the perspectives of convergence in the near future. We analyse the factors facilitating or inhibiting convergence, and the necessary exchanges between groups of countries which are mostly prone to harmonization. The paper integrates previous studies of the authors regarding European level convergence, bringing together best practices and strategies to achieve convergence not only regionally, but also within the European higher education sector.

The paper analyzes the way in which different attributes of the community service are taken into consideration among the indicators used in international university rankings. Also, the paper discusses the extent to which these factors influence positioning of the university in the overall ranking. For this purpose, eleven international rankings of world universities have been examined to identify those indicators that address community service issues. These are meant to measure how seriously a university takes its obligations to society by investing in community. Furthermore, two main criteria form the basis of analysis, namely social responsibility and regional engagement, as these include explicit measures for community service. The results suggest that there is a positive correlation between ranking in social responsibility and the overall ranking for universities investigated, and between ranking in regional engagement and overall ranking, but of different intensity.

Digital transformation has become a priority for any organization and Universities are not an exception. This paper deals with the digital transformation that is being undertaken at the University of Porto (U. Porto). In order to understand its major guidelines, it is important to clarify the term “digital transformation” and “digital business strategy”, comparing these new concepts with prevailing views of aligning the business strategy with the IT strategy. A newly created Shared Services Center (UPSSC) is at the core of the digital business strategy of U. Porto. This endeavor triggered a profound university wide re-engineering, that was enabled by a new work management system, hereafter referred to as UPWMS. The discussion of the distinctive characteristics of this work management system and how it copes with the diversity and heterogeneity of the requests received by the Shared Services, is the main objective of the paper. A discussion of the main cornerstones of the project in the context of the digital transformation strategy finishes the paper.

E-learning technologies represent important instruments for teaching. New technologies play a big role in the financial education of citizens and employees’ training activities. In recent years in the banking sector digital tools for education programmes are available in growing numbers and play a significant role. In fact, after the financial crisis, many banks have offered not only online training to their employees but also to their clients, both real and potential. The objective of this approach is to help banks’ customers to understand some fundamental financial concepts and the risks of some financial operations. Given this framework, the aim of this paper is to provide an exploratory research of the online training courses and initiatives developed by the banking sector institutions and addressed to both their employees and their real and potential clients. The paper provides a preliminary analysis of the programmes based on the experience of an Italian bank.

Telecom providers are losing tremendous amounts of money due to fraud risks posed to Telecom services and products. Currently, they are mainly focusing on fraud detection approaches to reduce the impact of fraud risks against their services. However, fraud prevention approaches should also be investigated in order to further reduce fraud risks and improve the revenue of Telecom providers. Fraud risk modelling is a fraud prevention approach aims at identifying the potential fraud risks, estimating the damage and setting up preventive mechanisms before the fraud risks lead to actual losses. In this paper, we highlight the important requirements for a usable and context-aware fraud risk modelling approach for Telecom services. To do so, we have conducted two workshops with experts from a Telecom provider and experts from multi-disciplinary areas. In order to show and document the requirements, we present two exemplary Telecom fraud scenarios, analyse and estimate the impacts of fraud risks qualitatively.

This paper investigates the application of new technologies, specifically social networks, in the mega sporting events, adopting the value co-creation perspective. We aim to evidence how, by adopting the co-creation value concept, thanks to the new technologies, specifically the innovative communication channels, the Olympic Games assume a greater value and are more successful in terms of followers, as athletes, fans, participants, and so forth. Thanks to the spread of social networks in the Olympic Games, the general consumers, mainly the fans, are able to give feedbacks, opinions, suggestions, and evidence criticisms about the same mega sporting events, by interacting directly with athletes, organizers and all the actors involved in this very complex managerial and organizing process. This study, conducted through a review of the literature and a comparative analysis of Summer Olympic Games editions during the period 1992–2016, represents a research starting point that allows us to evidence the crucial role played by the social networks in the mega sporting events improving their social value in the co-creation value perspective. This paper may provide interesting theoretical and managerial implications.

The public transport service system provides safe and secure urban mobility for all citizens. This paper describes work-in-progress regarding its role in times of emergency, such as earthquakes, tornadoes, or terrorist attacks. In order to deliver good and safe transport service, it requires adequate resources such as information, staff, property, vehicle, infrastructure, the set of operational rules, and governance. In this perspective, establishing a sustainable and smart transport model to cope with transport services’ disruptions especially for emergency events is vital. A general characterization of critical actions for public transport Emergency Management Planning is provided. A new perspective on designing sustainable public transport services in times of emergency is introduced in order to support transport service company’s operational activities based on sustainable institutions principles.

This paper presents a perspective related to information service integration for pollution awareness evaluation. The proposed methodology is based on indirect information analysis as retrieved from available literature over time. A time series - type analysis highlighting usage of pollution-related terms is employed. The displayed impact of pollution is evaluated based on public awareness, exposed through digitalized available publications. Estimation techniques and tools are also employed in order to evaluate the exact impact of pollution related events on society. The proposed methodology fosters the design of improved environmental monitoring smart services, specifically addressing the development of data processing components in information sub-systems of EISs (Enterprise Information Systems).

The paper introduces a framework for designing flexible Environment Control Services (EServices) based on generic sensing, modelling and control process specifications allowing the customization of distributed Facility Environment Control Systems (HFES) in holonic approach. The representation, assessment, configuring and implementation of these EServices by the interacting holons using data structures models in different perspectives their type, features, functionalities, interdependencies and usage: (i) the EService Type perspective used to identify a requested type of service included in an existing service-ontology; (ii) the EService Specification perspective allowing the client (the environment conditioning application) to define the facility’s environment needs as service properties; (iii) the EService Profile perspective in which the resources publish their capabilities matching the requested EService Type, exposing them to (iv) the EService Configuring and Implementation perspective. In the resulting Service-oriented HFES (SoHFES), four types of processes: environment monitoring, control, conditioning and production influencing, represented in the service perspective either as simple or composite services according to timing progression, granularity and concurrency of their operations can be standardized into EServices which allows for flexibility, agility, robustness and reusability of control solutions. A generic design framework and experimental results are finally presented.

Service systems’ capabilities to generate (positive or negative) externalities and their impact at the societal level has remained under-investigated so far. This study addresses this gap and explores how an innovative organizational architecture based on (i) a network of competent actors, (ii) an (ICT-enabled) platform serving as a network commons and (iii) a shared institutional logic and worldview enables the emergence and evolution of a service ecosystem with strong positive externalities. It was conducted an in-depth longitudinal study (2013–2016) on an ICT-enabled community of IT professionals, aimed to provide unemployed professionals with employment opportunities while also providing small and micro enterprises and non-profit organizations with affordable, high-level IT services. The case-study shows that the presence of non-profit organizations in the service ecosystem strongly influences the service ecosystem’s institutional logic and worldview and facilitates sustainability-oriented self-organizing throughout the ecosystem.

This paper examines the quality of municipal services within inner-city services. It identifies the most important service quality dimensions that determine citizen satisfaction. System dynamics approach is used to model and analyze ways to improve citizen satisfaction. For that purpose, we developed questionnaires based on ServQual. 634 questionnaires were distributed to respondents in a town neighborhood of about 16,000 citizens. The relevance of the ServQual dimensions was validated. Three of the ServQual dimensions: reliability, empathy and responsiveness, significantly predicted citizen satisfaction. The paper discusses ways to guide practitioners to improve quality attributes and enhance inner-city customer satisfaction.

In a service quality perspective, the animal behavior of humans (e.g. human ethology) in queues has, to our knowledge, never been observed. This paper provides an empirical exploratory enquiry with the scope to understand skiers’ behaviors in cable cars queues in order to improve their overall satisfaction. We carried 82 immersions and 43 semi-directed interviews in the Swiss Alps (Valais), during the scholar vacations of February 2016. Along with the literature review, this research provides hypotheses to better understand the interface between a human queue and a mechanical transportation system. To adjust to the rigid system of the cable cars, our results show that a queue’s regulation is mostly based on ethological behavior.