Melissa Cefkin

Dynamics of value co-creation in complex IT service engagements

The hallmark of service—value co-creation—is not easy to achieve in B2B IT service engagements. Typically, client and provider are both complicated organizational entities with multiple agendas and diverse stakeholders, and engagements often extend over years. We analyzed a number of IT service engagements to better understand their complex dynamics, with the ultimate goal of improving their outcomes. This paper reports on our study of how value co-creation unfolds over time, and identifies basic dynamics central to the modeling of service systems—actualization of service and realization of value—that are reflected in the proposed framework.

Social factors in creating an integrated capability for health system modeling and simulation

The health system is a complex system of systems – changes in agriculture, transportation, economics, family life, medical practices, and many other things can have a profound influence on health and health costs. Yet today, policy-level investment decisions are frequently made by modeling individual systems in isolation. We describe two sets of issues that we face in trying to develop a platform, method, and service for integrating expert models from different domains to support health policy and investment decisions. The first set of questions concerns how to develop accurate social and behavioral health models and integrate them with engineering models of transportation, clinic operations, and so forth. The second set of questions concerns the design of an environment that will encourage and facilitate collaboration between the health modelers themselves, who come from a wide variety of disciplines.

Information technology for healthcare transformation

Rising costs, decreasing quality of care, diminishing productivity, and increasing complexity have all contributed to the present state of the healthcare industry. The interactions between payers (e.g., insurance companies and health plans) and providers (e.g., hospitals and laboratories) are growing and are becoming more complicated. The constant upsurge in and enhanced complexity of diagnostic and treatment information has made the clinical decision-making process more difficult. Medical transaction charges are greater than ever. Population-specific financial requirements are increasing the economic burden on the entire system. Medical insurance and identity theft frauds are on the rise. The current lack of comparative cost analytics hampers systematic efficiency. Redundant and unnecessary interventions add to medical expenditures that add no value. Contemporary payment models are antithetic to outcome-driven medicine. The rate of medical errors and mistakes is high. Slow inefficient processes and the lack of best practice support for care delivery do not create productive settings. Information technology has an important role to play in approaching these problems. This paper describes IBM Researchs approach to helping address these issues, i.e., the evidence-based healthcare platform.

A Perfect Storm? Reimagining Work in the Era of the End of the Job

Trends of independent workers, an economy of increasingly automated processes and an ethos of the peer-to-peer “sharing economy” are all coming together to transform work and employment as we know them. Emerging forms of “open” and “crowd” work are particularly keen sites for investigating how the structures and experiences of work, employment and organizations are changing. Drawing on research and design of work in organizational contexts, this paper explores how experiences with open and crowd work systems serve as sites of workplace cultural re-imagining. A marketplace, a crowdwork system and a crowdfunding experiment, all implemented within IBM, are examined as instances of new workplace configurations.

Back to the future of organizational work: crowdsourcing and digital work marketplaces

Businesses increasingly accomplish work through innovative sourcing models that leverage the crowd. As a new way of distributing work across units within an organization and as a form of outsourcing work beyond organizational boundaries, crowdwork is inherently disruptive. Crowdwork raises a number of questions about its implications to the future of organizational work, including reconfigurations to the very nature of work, consideration of the opportunities and threats to both organizational forms and worker status, and about the systems that underlie and are meant to support crowdwork. There is a need for a clear research agenda to address these challenges and to inform the design of solutions for crowdwork as it integrates with other forms of organizational work.

The implications of enterprise-wide pipeline management tools for organizational relations and exchanges

This paper explores the impact of enterprise-wide processes and technologies on group relations and exchanges. We examine the use of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools in sales pipeline management. Through an ethnographic study of globally-distributed sales teams we show that the way enterprise-wide tools are integrated into daily practices impacts organizational relations and exchange. We pay particular attention to information exchange as a vehicle for building, leveraging and deterring organizational relations. Our analysis suggests that different approaches to using standardized tools and processes have variable impact on team relations. We provide support for the argument that technologies should be designed and deployed in accordance with an understanding of the contexts of use and in consideration for their impact on organizational relations.

Business Value in Complex IT Service Engagements: Realization is Governed by Patterns of Interaction

Mutually successful win-win outcomes in complex IT service engagements are by no means easy to achieve. Typically, provider and client represent complex organizational entities with multiple agendas and diverse stakeholders involved in long-term engagements. Unsurprisingly, new opportunities to create value arise; however, value propositions can fail to be realized, especially when the provider has fulfilled contractual agreements and yet the customer has expressed dissatisfaction. How do we explain this phenomenon, and more importantly, avoid its occurrence? In this paper we examine three IT service engagements through the lens of a conceptual model based on foundational service system concepts. Cross-case analysis reveals patterns of interaction that have the potential to increase, and in some instances, diminish value over time. Our approach identifies leading indicators that mitigate risk and increase benefit to both clients and provider, enabling IT service companies to take advantage of emerging opportunities that lead to greater value co-creation.

The Grand Diversion: Play, Work and Virtual Worlds

Enterprises, including corporations, use virtual worlds for such purposes as marketing, training, and recruitment and, increasingly, meetings. As researchers whose primary focus has been on the nature of “work” and the sites and institutions that mediate contemporary experiences of work, the authors reflect on the implications of play as a constitutive feature of virtual worlds through consideration of institutional uses of virtual worlds. Evidence for the claim that play has emerged as the paradigmatic metaphor for interpreting and designing virtual worlds is presented. A case from the authors’ company’s application of virtual worlds to work and learning environments is unpacked to explore how notions of play and game drove particular ways of proceeding and not others and the implications of this thinking for the resulting solution. Questions are raised concerning what such a rethinking may entail and the opportunities it may hold for opening up new opportunities and understandings of virtual worlds.

Mapping and visualizing service provider and client interactions: the case for participation

The interactions between service providers and their clients (touchpoints) define the service experience for clients and providers alike. In the context of IT outsourcing services, where one company contracts with another for IT services, these interactions are frequent and occur across an increasingly globally distributed delivery organization. The scope and complexity of these interactions provide a challenge for managing the service experience in that it is difficult for members of the delivery team to be aware of the wide range of interactions taking place with clients. This project is focused on designing ways to enable delivery teams to create awareness of their touchpoints with clients and to make changes to improve the overall client experience.

When Are Calories Like Furniture? Modeling Service Systems to Improve Health

The furniture retailer IKEA provides an example of how understanding the roles and responsibilities of stakeholders in a value constellation can lead to change that improves value creation in a complex service system. In this paper, we apply the same kind of thinking about value creation that worked for IKEA to the complex service systems of population health, including chronic diseases such as obesity. We show how service system thinking -- analyzing value constellations to find opportunities for reconfiguring roles and relationships that unlock value -- can be applied to real health systems by focusing on accountable care organizations and patient-centered medical homes, models of care delivery that aim to reconfigure provider, patient, and payer relationships to offer better care. We argue that modeling and simulating the value constellations of complex service systems, such as the health system, can help us discover which interventions and reconfigurations will be effective and which will not.