Michael Goul

Moving Forward and Making a Difference: Research Priorities for the Science of Service

Given the significant, sustained growth in services experienced worldwide, Arizona State University’s Center for Services Leadership embarked on an 18-month effort to identify and articulate a set of global, interdisciplinary research priorities focused on the science of service. Diverse participation from academics in a variety of disciplines working in institutions around the world—in collaboration with business executives who lead organizations ranging from small startups to Global 1000 companies—formed the basis for development of the priorities. The process led to the identification of the following 10 overarching research priorities: • Fostering service infusion and growth • Improving well-being through transformative service • Creating and maintaining a service culture • Stimulating service innovation • Enhancing service design • Optimizing service networks and value chains • Effectively branding and selling services • Enhancing the service experience through cocreation • Measuring and optimizing the value of service • Leveraging technology to advance service For each priority, several important and more specific topic areas for service research emerged from the process. The intent is that the priorities will spur service research by shedding light on the areas of greatest value and potential return to academia, business, and government. Through academic, business, and government collaboration, we can enhance our understanding of service and create new knowledge to help tackle the most important opportunities and challenges we face today.

The Current State of Business Intelligence in Academia: The Arrival of Big Data

In December 2012, the AIS Special Interest Group on Decision Support, Knowledge and Data Management Systems (SIGDSS) and the Teradata University Network (TUN) cosponsored the Business Intelligence Congress 3 and conducted surveys to assess academia’s response to the growing market need for students with Business Intelligence (BI) and Business Analytics (BA) skill sets. This panel report describes the key findings and best practices that were identified, with an emphasis on what has changed since the BI Congress efforts in 2009 and 2010. The article also serves as a “call to action” for universities regarding the need to respond to emerging market needs in BI/BA, including “Big Data.” The IS field continues to be well positioned to be the leader in creating the next generation BI/BA workforce. To do so, we believe that IS leaders need to continuously refine BI/BA curriculum to keep pace with the turbulent BI/BA marketplace.

The design, development and validation of a knowledge-based organizational learning support system

It is generally agreed that organizational learning involves the processes of developing and exchanging organizational members underlying opinions, assumptions, and interpretations of the environment. This exploratory research applies innovative information technology (IT) to support and facilitate organizational learning. The organizational learning process is defined, and inhibitors to the process are identified and translated into system requirements for the design and development of the Organizational Learning Support System (OLSS) toolkit. The OLSS toolkit uses a knowledge-based system to elicit initial interpretations of the environment from organizational members and automatically detects where organizational members interpretations conflict and where they are in consensus. It uses a heuristic approach to order the presentation of the conflicts to the organizational members. A validation in the form of a pilot study is included.

Service-Oriented Methodology for Systems Development

Despite advances in software development practices, organizations struggle to implement methodologies that match the risk in a project environment with needed coordination capabilities. Plan-driven and agile software development methodologies each have strengths and risks. However, most project environments cannot be classified as entirely risky or stable, suggesting the need for hybrid approaches. We leverage a design science approach to implement a novel hybrid methodology based on concepts from the service-oriented paradigm. We motivate the approach using theory on interdependence and coordination, and design the methodology using theory on modularity and service-dominant logic. We also examine the effects of its adoption at a large electrical power company over a three-year period. The results imply that service-oriented theory should be applied to the human processes involved in systems development in order to achieve better fit between project risk, interdependencies, and the selected methodology(ies) in order to improve overall project performance.