Gerhard Satzger

Statistical Quality Control for Human-Based Electronic Services

Crowdsourcing in form of human-based electronic services (people services) provides a powerful way of outsourcing tasks to a large crowd of remote workers over the Internet. Research has shown that multiple redundant results delivered by different workers can be aggregated in order to achieve a reliable result. However, existing implementations of this approach are rather inefficient as they multiply the effort for task execution and are not able to guarantee a certain quality level. As a starting point towards an integrated approach for quality management of people services we have developed a quality management model that combines elements of statistical quality control (SQC) with group decision theory. The contributions of the workers are tracked and weighted individually in order to minimize the quality management effort while guaranteing a well-defined level of overall result quality. A quantitative analysis of the approach based on an optical character recognition (OCR) scenario confirms the efficiency and reach of the approach.

Technological Innovation and Its Impact on Business Model, Organization and Corporate Culture – IBM’s Transformation into a Globally Integrated, Service-Oriented Enterprise

This article investigates the influence of information and communication technology (ICT) on business transformation. First, the general, ICT-driven development lines of globalization and service-orientation are described. Then, an analysis of the IBM Corporation’s transformation over the past 50 years into a globally integrated, service-oriented company illustrates that ICT innovations must be dealt with by simultaneous adaptation of business model, organization and corporate culture. For many companies the ability to manage this change becomes increasingly critical.

Quality assurance for human-based electronic services: a decision matrix for choosing the right approach

Crowdsourcing in the form of human-based electronic services provides a powerful way of outsourcing so called human intelligence tasks (HITs) to a large workforce of people over the Internet. Because of the limited control over that workforce, it is challenging to ensure the quality of the work results. Several approaches have been proposed that can be applied to specific types of HITs. However, it is difficult to identify a suitable quality management approach for any given type of HIT. This paper aims to provide a first sketch of a decision matrix.

The Economics of Service Level Engineering

Today, the management of service quality poses a major challenge for many service providers and their business customers. We argue that the trade-off between service cost and benefit incurred by both parties is not sufficiently considered when service quality is stipulated. Up to now, neither in practice nor in academia a commonly accepted engineering approach exists to determine business-relevant performance metrics and associated cost-efficient target values to precisely identify efficient service quality. It can be expected, though, that such a systematically developed and economically well-founded Service Level Engineering approach - based on the individual economic conditions of customer and provider - can enhance the value generation in service systems formed by both these parties. In this work we lay the foundation for the field of Service Level Engineering discussing its constitutional concepts and elements. After developing a generic framework for different Service Level Engineering scenarios, we analyze one scenario - the system view - in detail as a quantitative optimization problem: In particular, we aim at the derivation of cost-efficient target values given business-relevant performance-metrics.

Dynamic and goal-based quality management for human-based electronic services

Crowdsourcing in the form of human-based electronic services (people services) provides a powerful way of outsourcing tasks to a large crowd of remote workers over the Internet. Research has shown that multiple redundant results delivered by different workers can be aggregated in order to achieve a reliable result. However, basic implementations of this approach are rather inefficient as they multiply the effort for task execution and are not able to guarantee a certain quality level. In this paper, we are addressing these challenges by elaborating on a statistical approach for quality management of people services which we had previously proposed. The approach combines elements of statistical quality management with dynamic group decisions. We present a comprehensive statistical model that enhances our original work and makes it more transparent. We also provide an extendible toolkit that implements our model and facilitates its application to real-time experiments as well as to simulations. A quantitative analysis based on an optical character recognition (OCR) scenario confirms the efficiency and reach of our model.

Towards a Model for Measuring Customer Intimacy in B2B Services

This paper proposes an approach for evaluating the relationship with a customer, leading to the creation of a Customer Intimacy Grade (CIG), across multiple levels of granularity: employee, team, business unit and whole organization. Our approach focuses on B2B service organizations which provide their customers with complex solutions and whose relationship with the customer is distributed among multiple employees and across different business units. The suggested approach should improve the systematic analysis of customer intimacy in organizations, leverage the customer knowledge scattered throughout the organization and enable benchmarking and focused investments in customer relationships.

Simulation-Based Quantification of Business Impacts Caused by Service Incidents

Today, business processes heavily depend on IT, so that business results are affected by the quality of supporting IT services. To gauge the quality of service from a business point of view, we need to consider the service incidents that occur over a reference period and evaluate the effect of each service incident individually. In this work, we address this problem by developing a procedure to monetarily quantify the negative impact of single service incidents on the service customer business.

Service Analytics: Leveraging Data Across Enterprise Boundaries for Competitive Advantage

The modern view on services focuses on the co-creation of value between providers and customers—leveraging knowledge, skills, and resources of both partners from an overall system point of view. This perspective goes beyond the typical customer integration in a traditional services context, thereby leading professional services firms to quickly adopt new methods to exploit this potential. This includes capturing, processing, and analyzing data produced by multiple actors within a services system with the objective to support strategy implementations and drive complex decisions—an area which we call “service analytics” in this paper. We describe the nature of service analytics and outline its distinctiveness with regard to business analytics. We subsequently provide a typology of its approaches based on the different types of data available in services systems. We finally illustrate the potential of service analytics by means of two application scenarios: customer intimacy analytics focusing on the service encounter as well as demand and inventory analytics which are concerned with customer usage.

Business Cost Budgets - A Methodology to Incorporate Business Impact into Service Level Agreements

In this work the authors address an IT service customer’s challenge of selecting the cost-optimal service level agreement among different options offered by an external provider. They model the customer’s optimization problem at distinctive levels of detail with regard to the description of service quality aspects. At each level of detail they explicitly consider the potential negative monetary impact of different service quality levels on a customer’s business process – reflected via the concept of “business cost.†First, they analyze which information a customer typically bases service level agreement decisions upon today and elaborate on the question which additional information a rational customer would need to take a well-founded decision. Second, the authors define a set of concepts that a customer should consider when selecting service level agreements. Third, the authors apply these concepts to develop a “business cost budget method†that enables a customer to compare multiple service level agreements and to select the cost-optimal solution of its optimization problem – assuming customer and provider to collaborate. Introducing this approach, they suggest that both parties jointly define “business cost budgets†as an additional kind of service indicator describing service quality’s adverse business impact instead of only service quality.

Transition and Delivery Challenges of Retained Organizations in IT Outsourcing

Outsourcing their IT is a difficult endeavor for many enterprises. Remaining IT organizations often face a multitude of challenges but lack the necessary capabilities for managing the outsourced services. In this paper, we provide rankings of these challenges with regard to the implementation of retained organizations and their daily business. While the most critical issues arise at the interface with the service provider, the interfaces with the own business units are problematic as well. Our findings reveal that particularly the early involvement of the own business units and the development of sufficient awareness of upcoming changes are key success factors. Our research is based on the results of an extensive explorative study. With our work, we lay the basis for a better understanding of the transition challenges of retained organizations and, thus, a mature implementation and operation of these.