Hansjörg Fromm

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.

Big Data—Technologies and Potential

Recently, the term Big Data has gained tremendous popularity in business and academic discussions and is now prominently used in scientific publications (Jacobs, Communications of the ACM—A Blind person’s interaction with technology, 2009), business literature (Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier, Big Data. A revolution that will transform how we live, work, and think, 2013; McAfee and Brynjolfsson, Harvard Business Review 90, 2012), whitepapers and analyst reports (Brown et al., Big Data. The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity, 2011b; Economist Intelligence Unit 2012; Schroeck et al., Analytics: The real-world use of Big Data, 2012), as well as in popular magazines (Cukier 2010). While all these references somewhat associate the term with a new paradigm for data processing and analytics, the perception of what exactly it refers to are very diverse. The gap in the understanding of the phenomenon of Big Data is highlighted by the results of a recent study – in which respondents were asked to choose descriptions of the term Big Data – resulting in diverse characterizations such as, e.g., “A greater scope of information”, “New kinds of data and analysis” or “Real-time information” (Schroeck et al. 2012).

On the Necessity and Nature of E-Mobility Services – Towards a Service Description Framework

After years of focusing exclusively on the technological side of electric mobility (e-mobility), services are getting more and more in the focus of scientists. Many recent works concentrate on the identification and analysis of the potential of new business models in this field. Although the relevancy of services for the success of e-mobility is becoming more obvious among industry and science, there is still a lack in scientific contributions when asking for a comprehensive overview of existing e-mobility services. With this paper, we try to bridge this gap by providing a framework that enables the description and classification of services around the usage of an electric vehicle (EV). The framework captures six dimensions which allows to characterize and compare different services. This enables the identification of commonalities and differences between the services and provides an interdisciplinary playground for developing new services and further research in this field.

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.

Organizational Models for the Multi-sourcing Service Integration and Management Function

Multi-sourcing is gradually becoming the standard operating mode for outsourcing customers. The complex service landscapes of multi-sourcing settings, however, entail significant challenges for customers. They are struggling with managing the various providers and integrating interdependent services. One challenge is to motivate competing outsourcing providers to work together. In this paper, we present five organizational models to establish a service integration and management function in multi-sourcing. Our findings reveal that service integration and management is differentiated into strategic and operational activities. On the client side, the retained organization is the key organizational unit to perform strategic service integration and management. The organizational entity that performs the operational activities, however, varies with the respective organizational model. Our research is based on a literature review and a qualitative study. With our work, we lay the basis for a better understanding of service integration and management and, thus, more mature multi-sourcing implementations.

Industrial Services as a Research Discipline

Services in the industrial sector—commonly referred to as industrial services—are an important source of profit, differentiation and future growth for their providers. This sector includes industries such as heavy equipment manufacturing, energy production, chemical production and oil and gas. Despite its importance, neither the term industrial service(s) nor its concrete subareas are unambiguously defined. The goal of this paper is to motivate research which addresses the challenges currently faced in the industrial sector with regard to service. For this purpose, we review existing definitions of industrial services and identify the services in scope as well as the scientific disciplines that can contribute. The main part of the paper is a list of relevant current and future challenges which have been encountered by the authors during their daily practice.

Fundamentals of Service Systems

This textbook addresses the conceptual and practical aspects of the various phases of the lifecycle of service systems, ranging from service ideation, design, implementation, analysis, improvement and trading associated with service systems engineering. Written by leading experts in the field, this indispensable textbook will enable a new wave of future professionals to think in a service-focused way with the right balance of competencies in computer science, engineering, and management. Fundamentals of Service Systems is a centerpiece for a course syllabus on service systems. Each chapter includes a summary, a list of learning objectives, an opening case, and a review section with questions, a project description, a list of key terms, and a list of further reading bibliography. All these elements enable students to learn at a faster and more comfortable peace. For researchers, teachers, and students who want to learn about this new emerging science, Fundamentals of Service Systems provides an overview of the core disciplines underlying the study of service systems. It is aimed at students of information systems, information technology, and business and economics. It also targets business and IT practitioners, especially those who are looking for better ways of innovating, designing, modeling, analyzing, and optimizing service systems.

Service Innovation Analytics: Towards an Approach for Validating Frameworks for Service Innovation Capabilities via Text Mining

The importance of innovation for companies to gain competitive advantage is widely acknowledged. Realizing service innovations has shown to provide some particular challenges to organizations. Consequently, in recent years, several frameworks of capabilities for service innovation have been published; however, often not yet validated. Conventional empirical validation approaches are time and resource intense. In this research-in-progress paper we aim for indications that text mining can be applied to companies’ documents written in natural language so that frameworks for service innovation capabilities can be validated. Building on established methods in text mining, we are working towards an approach to realize this. The paper outlines the approach and reports on the encouraging results from an exploratory study, which we have conducted by applying the approach to a single capability from a prominently discussed service innovation capability framework.

Using Employees’ Collective Intelligence for Service Innovation: Theory and Instruments

In this chapter, we reflect on the potential and instruments for involving employees in service innovation processes. Based on a discussion of value co-creation scenarios in the context of service innovation, we conjecture that frontline employees of service providers can be powerful proxies for their customers. Thus, they might be a particularly valuable group to involve in service innovation endeavors. The quality of these proxies may increase with the depth of insights frontline employees can gain from their customers. Moreover, as the literature suggests, these employees can also cater for the strategic and cultural fit of service innovations to their organizations, to avoid a reported drawback of directly involving customers in the service innovation process. Hence, we first suggest leveraging the potential of large numbers of these employees through collective intelligence instruments and derive design recommendations for such approaches. In the second part of the chapter, we then introduce and compare four types of collective intelligence instruments that are currently used by companies to involve employees. We close by suggesting avenues for further research in this domain.