Centre for Service Research What Service Science offers

Centre for Service Research What Service Science offers to Business Linda A Macaulay Professor of System Design Centre Director

Why a Centre for Service Research? The Centre for Service Research was created in response to a number of problems: 1. The shift from manufacturing to service • • • 2. Economies have become dominated by service sectors Service thought of as a ‘craft’ and lacks the scientific rigour of traditional engineering A more scientific approach to service is needed but research is lagging behind The complexity of service • • 3. Both business to business and business to consumer Requires research into service innovation and how a service is the designed, delivered, managed, used, measured and evaluated Requires contribution from many disciplines Research is traditionally conducted in silos and does not facilitate the holistic thinking needed to address complexity The growth in services is changing the way companies organise themselves • Creating a skills gap that requires people to have knowledge about people, business and information technology in the design and delivery of service

Challenges for the Centre To bring experts together to make the ‘T-shaped’ To be problem driven To create and work towards visions of the future To work with the international Service Research and Innovation Community To develop research led curriculum To work with business and academic collaborators to specify, design and deliver the service curriculum

Centre for Service Research Computer Science e. Work Operations Management Service Systems Marketing CSR Socio-Technical MIOIR (service innovation) Decision Sciences Accounting & Finance Existing Research Groups with staff contributing to CSR

Expertise of Staff in the Centre Information Management Work organisation Service design Service Innovation Service Data engineering Risk assessment Predictive modelling Service Operations Knowledge intensive services Innovation Design Operations Delivery Management Marketing Holistic thinking Human computer Interaction Systems thinking Service quality Service Marketing Socio-technical Design Service oriented architectures Human Resource Management Performance measurement

Building the Centre around problems • Example of a Centre workshop: – to share understanding of each others contribution • Patrick Dixon, Futurist of Globalchange. com talks about his vision for call centres • 16 people present each person asked: – What is your area of expertise? – How would you analyse the problem? – How would you help to achieve the vision? • Watch the video, what would your response be…

Responses Need to look for sources of innovation A performance measurement problem A data problem A human technology interaction problem A people problem A work organisation problem An information management problem An operational procedures problem It’s a…. “I’d want to analyse if there any gaps, between what the customer wants, what the organisation is saying it delivered, and to try and look at the processes that constitute this call centre. …. There seems to be little communication between different processes, so people have to call time and time again. “ Claire Moxham, Operations Management “We have done ethnographic studies of how these call centres work and we also did some analysis of discourse analysis, what is actually happening with the telephone calls at the moment, we took the telephone calls apart and we were able to help them restructure the service they delivered and their training. ” Kathy Keeling, Marketing “Broadly, the perspective we would have is that we need to consider data understanding, data representation, conceptualisation and a clever searching/extraction problem: data-->information-->knowledge - with an iterative, real time/performance aspect to it. We're interested in the tracking concerns that contextualise the interaction, and the concerns of individual element of customisation and segmentation. Ultimately what we try to do is describe what's contained within data and, where possible, predict what may occur. ” John Keane, Computer Science and Decision Sciences, MBS

Further quotes…. “I look at this as a knowledge problem, how to capture the knowledge how to reproduce it, and how to actually summarise what you have in the system …. . So extracting information from unstructured data and integrating it with databases or other data that are in the company. ” Goran Nenadic, Computer Science “I would look at it from a risk perspective analysing the risks of outsourcing, whether to outsource within the country, whether to outsource to India, or to other locations abroad. What parts of the service to outsource …risk and cost. . . ” Brian Nicholson, Accounting and Finance “I think what struck me as being very interesting is when he first came on and said “that the customer wants to see a human and not a robot” So, how interesting because what we say in HRM is that the worker says we want to be treated as a human and not a robot, and they often say that they feel a part of this system and not they have no space to be human. …. . how interesting maybe if they were given the space to be more human they would act more human so the customer could appreciate that. ” Victoria Bishop, Human Resource Management “I disagree that all customers want to see a human face behind a service delivery there are customers that really want to be empowered and to have all the capabilities that could allow them to tap into companies back office. ” Pedro Sampaio, Business Technology

Visions of the business of the future For example… Business benefits Service ecosystem Networked business E-commerce website E-mail Integrated Supply Chain Dynamic Aggregation Of offers Organisational Natural selection Interworking And evolution Of business service Virtual Partners project enterprises by project Order & Value-chain Pay online Integration Reduction of Transaction costs Costs New markets Adapted from Cisco study on e-commerce in small business Extent of organisational change and sophistication

Service ecosystem = business ecosystem + digital ecosystem Bringing together social and technical in future vision Business ecosystem Business Process Work organisation Relationship Management Knowledge Management Innovation Service oriented architecture Merging of IT, telecoms & media Software service Digital ecosystem F. Nachira et al, (2007), Digital Business Ecosystems

Learn more: Posters See some examples of Centre Research in the 22 posters on display in the Atrium from 40 contributors Each poster covers research overview current research key achievements (see list of posters in your pack)

How we can work together • RESEARCH – Joint Research Projects (through funding bids to EU and UK Research Councils) – Collaboration between CSR and your Research Centre or group • EDUCATION – Joint Development of Case studies e. g. describing examples of service practice • THEORY INTO PRACTICE – Giving a seminar or guest lecture at a CSR event – Attending CSR seminars and lectures – Taking part in our Practitioners Forum • PROBLEM SETTING – Setting problems for investigation by research Centre staff or students (BSc, MBA) or for doctoral candidates • KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER – Knowledge Transfer of research outcomes to practice from CSR to public or private sector organisations through consultancy or government funded KTP projects • CONTINUING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT – Executive MBA or CPD development activities (short courses, training, form in pack See feedback seminars, workshops)

Centre for Service Research List of Centre downloads List of resources maintained by CSR on www. ssmenetuk. org Fuller description of CSR staff and research on http: //www. mbs. ac. uk/research/csr/index. aspx The Centre is still embryonic and we hope you will join us in helping to make it a major national and international focus for Service Research Thank you for listening