Identification and specification of relationships as the foundation for service bundling

Service bundling can be regarded as an option for service providers to strengthen their competitive advantages, cope with dynamic market conditions and heterogeneous consumer demand. Despite these positive effects, actual guidance for the identification of service bundles and the act of bundling itself can be regarded as a gap. Previous research has resulted in a conceptualization of a service bundling method relying on a structured service description in order to fill this gap. This method addresses the reasoning about the suitability of services to be part of a bundle based on analyzing existing relationships between services captured by a description language. This paper extends the aforementioned research by presenting an initial set of empirically derived relationships between services in existing bundles that can subsequently be utilized to identify potential new bundles. Additionally, a gap analysis points out to what extent prominent ontologies and service description languages accommodate for the identified relationships.

Decision-support for service bundling

Offering service bundles to the market is a promising option for service providers to strengthen their competitive advantages, cope with dynamic market conditions and deal with heterogeneous consumer demand. Although the expected positive effects of bundling strategies and pricing considerations for bundles are covered well by the available literature, limited guidance can be found regarding the identification of potential bundle candidates and the actual process of bundling. The proposed research aims at filling this gap by offering a service bundling method complemented by a proof-of-concept prototype, which extends the existing knowledge base in the multidisciplinary research area of Information Systems and Service Science as well as providing an organisation with a structured approach for bundling services.

Service identification through value chain analysis and prioritization

In a resource constrained business world, strategic choices must be made on process improvement and service delivery. There are calls for more agile forms of enterprises and much effort is being directed at moving organizations from a complex landscape of disparate application systems to that of an integrated and flexible enterprise accessing complex systems landscapes through service oriented architecture (SOA). This paper describes the deconstruction of an enterprise into business services using value chain analysis as each element in the value chain can be rendered as a business service in the SOA. These business services are explicitly linked to the attainment of specific organizational strategies and their contribution to the attainment of strategy is assessed and recorded. This contribution is then used to provide a rank order of business service to strategy. This information facilitates executive decision making on which business service to develop into the SOA. The paper describes an application of this Critical Service Identification Methodology (CSIM) to a case study.

Evaluating the effect of a patient education brochure on patients’ expectations and satisfaction with emergency department service

Introduction: The purpose of this study was to assess the capacity of a written intervention, in this case a patient information brochure, to improve patient satisfaction during an Emergency Department (ED) visit. For the purpose of measuring the effect of the intervention the ED journey was conceptualised as a series of distinct areas of service comprising waiting time, service by the triage nurse, care from doctors and nurses and information giving Background of study: Research into patient satisfaction has become a widespread activity endorsed by both governments and hospital administrations. The literature on ED patient satisfaction has consistently indicated three primary areas of patient dissatisfaction: waiting time, nursing care and communication. Recent developments in the literature on patient satisfaction studies however have highlighted the relationship between patients. expectations of a service encounter and their consequent assessment of the experience as dissatisfying or satisfying. Disconfirmation theory posits that the degree to which expectations are confirmed will affect subsequent levels of satisfaction. The conceptual framework utilised in this study is Coye.s (2004) model of disconfirmation. Coye while reiterating satisfaction is a consequence of the degree expectations are either confirmed or disconfirmed also posits that expectations can be modified by interventions. Coye.s work conceptualises these interventions as intra encounter experiences (cues) which function to adjust expectations. Coye suggests some cues are unintended and may have a negative impact which also reinforces the value of planned cues intended to meet or exceed consumer expectations. Consequently the brochure can be characterized as a potentially positive cue, encouraging the patient to understand processes and to orient them in what can be a confronting environment. Only a limited number of studies have examined the effect of written interventions within an ED. No studies could be located which have tested the effect of ED interventions using a conceptual framework which relates the effect of the degree to which expectations are confirmed or disconfirmed in terms of satisfaction with services. Method: Two studies were conducted. Study One used qualitative methods to explore patients. expectations of the ED from the perspective of both patients and health care professionals. Study One was used in part to direct the development of the intervention (brochure) in Study Two. The brochure was an intervention designed to modify patients. expectations thus increasing their satisfaction with the provision of ED service. As there was no existing tools to measure ED patients. expectations and satisfaction a new tool was also developed based on the findings and the literature of Study One. Study Two used a non-randomised, quasi-experimental approach using a non-equivalent post-test only comparison group design used to investigate the effect of the patient education brochure (Stommel and Wills, 2004). The brochure was disseminated to one of two study groups (the intervention group). The effect of the brochure was assessed by comparing the data obtained from both the intervention and control group. These two groups consisted of 150 participants each. It was expected that any differences in the relevant domains selected for examination would indicate the effect of the brochure both on expectation and potentially satisfaction. Results: Study One revealed several areas of common ground between patients and nurses in terms of relevant content for the written intervention, including the need for information on the triage system and waiting times. Areas of difference were also found with patients emphasizing communication issues, whereas focus group members expressed concern that patients were often unable to assimilate verbal information. The findings suggested the potential utility of written material to reinforce verbal communication particularly in terms of the triage process and other ED protocols. This material was synthesized within the final version of the written intervention. Overall the results of Study Two indicated no significant differences between the two groups. The intervention group did indicate a significant number of participants who viewed the brochure of having changed their expectations. The effect of the brochure may have been obscured by a lack of parity between the two groups as the control group presented with statistically significantly higher levels of acuity and experienced significantly shorter waiting times. In terms of disconfirmation theory this would suggest expectations that had been met or exceeded. The results confirmed the correlation of expectations with satisfaction. Several domains also indicated age as a significant predictor with older patients tending to score higher satisfaction results. Other significant predictors of satisfaction established were waiting time and care from nurses, reinforcing the combination of efficient service and positive interpersonal experiences as being valued by patients. Conclusions: Information presented in written form appears to benefit a significant number of ED users in terms of orientation and explaining systems and procedures. The degree to which these effects may interact with other dimensions of satisfaction however is likely to be limited. Waiting time and interpersonal behaviours from staff also provide influential cues in determining satisfaction. Written material is likely to be one element in a series of coordinated strategies to improve patient satisfaction during periods of peak demand.

Service bid comparisons by fuzzy ranking in open railway market timetabling

In an open railway access market, the Infrastructure Provider (IP), upon the receipts of service bids from the Train Service Providers (TSPs), assigns track access rights according to its own business objectives and the merits of the bids; and produces the train service timetable through negotiations. In practice, IP chooses to negotiate with the TSPs one by one in such a sequence that IP optimizes its objectives. The TSP bids are usually very complicated, containing a large number of parameters in different natures. It is a difficult task even for an expert to give a priority sequence for negotiations from the contents of the bids. This study proposes the application of fuzzy ranking method to compare and prioritize the TSP bids in order to produce a negotiation sequence. The results of this study allow investigations on the behaviors of the stakeholders in bid preparation and negotiation, as well as evaluation of service quality in the open railway market.

Scheduling coordination through negotiation between train service providers in an open railway access market

A schedule coordination problem involving two train services provided by different operators is modeled as an optimization of revenue intake. The coordination is achieved through the adjustment of commencement times of the train services by negotiation. The problem is subject to constraints regarding to passenger demands and idle costs of rolling-stocks from both operators. This paper models the operators as software agents having the flexibility to incorporate one of the two (and potentially more) proposed negotiation strategies. Empirical results show that agents employing different combination of strategies have significant impact on the quality of solution and negotiation time.

Regulation of train service by coasting control in metro railway system

To maximise the capacity of the rail lineand provide a reliable service for pas-sengers throughout the day, regulation of train service to maintain steady service headway is es-sential. In most current metro systems, train usually starts coasting at a fixed distance from the departed station to achieve service regulation. However, this approach is only effective with re-spect to a nominal operational condition of train schedule but not necessarily the current service demand. Moreover, it is not simply to identify the necessary starting point for coasting under the run time constraints of current service conditions since train movement is attributed by a large number of factors, most of which are non-linear and inter-dependent. This paper presents an ap-plication of classical measures to search for the appropriate coasting point to meet a specified inter-station run time and they can be integrated in the on-board Automatic Train Operation (ATO) system and have the potential for on-line implementation in making a set of coasting command decisions.

Weighted fairness with MCR guarantee and a general-purpose explicit rate allocation algorithm for ATM ABR service

In this paper, weighted fair rate allocation for ATM available bit rate (ABR) service is discussed with the concern of the minimum cell rate (MCR). Weighted fairness with MCR guarantee has been discussed recently in the literature. In those studies, each ABR virtual connection (VC) is first allocated its MCR, then the remaining available bandwidth is further shared among ABR VCs according to their weights. For the weighted fairness defined in this paper, the bandwidth is first allocated according to each VC's weight; if a VC's weighted share is less than its MCR, it should be allocated its MCR instead of the weighted share. This weighted fairness with MCR guarantee is referred to as extended weighted (EXW) fairness. Certain theoretical issues related to EXW, such as its global solution and bottleneck structure, are first discussed in the paper. A distributed explicit rate allocation algorithm is then proposed to achieve EXW fairness in ATM networks. The algorithm is a general-purpose explicit rate algorithm in the sense that it can realise almost all the fairness principles proposed for ABR so far whilst only minor modifications may be needed.

Fair flow control of ABR service by per-VC virtual queuing

In this paper, a rate-based flow control scheme based upon per-VC virtual queuing is proposed for the Available Bit Rate (ABR) service in ATM. In this scheme, each VC in a shared buffer is assigned a virtual queue, which is a counter. To achieve a specific kind of fairness, an appropriate scheduler is applied to the virtual queues. Each VC's bottleneck rate (fair share) is derived from its virtual cell departure rate. This approach of deriving a VC's fair share is simple and accurate. By controlling each VC with respect to its virtual queue and queue build-up in the shared buffer, network congestion is avoided. The principle of the control scheme is first illustrated by max–min flow control, which is realised by scheduling the virtual queues in round-robin. Further application of the control scheme is demonstrated with the achievement of weighted fairness through weighted round robin scheduling. Simulation results show that with a simple computation, the proposed scheme achieves the desired fairness exactly and controls network congestion effectively.

Output feedback control of discrete-time systems in networked environments

This correspondence paper addresses the problem of output feedback stabilization of control systems in networked environments with quality-of-service (QoS) constraints. The problem is investigated in discrete-time state space using Lyapunov’s stability theory and the linear inequality matrix technique. A new discrete-time modeling approach is developed to describe a networked control system (NCS) with parameter uncertainties and nonideal network QoS. It integrates a network-induced delay, packet dropout, and other network behaviors into a unified framework. With this modeling, an improved stability condition, which is dependent on the lower and upper bounds of the equivalent network-induced delay, is established for the NCS with norm-bounded parameter uncertainties. It is further extended for the output feedback stabilization of the NCS with nonideal QoS. Numerical examples are given to demonstrate the main results of the theoretical development.

Evaluation on service quality of railway timetable

From the business viewpoint, the railway timetable is a list of the products presented by the railway transportation operators to the customers, specifying the schedules of all the train services on a railway line or network. In order to evaluate the quality of the train service schedules, a number of indices are proposed in this paper. These indices primarily take the passengers’ needs, such as waiting time, transfer time and transport capacity into consideration. Delay rate is usually used in post-evaluation. In this study, we propose to give an evaluation on the probability that the scheduled train services are likely to be delayed and the recovery ability of the timetable after delay has occurred. The evaluation identifies the possible problems in the services, such as excessive waiting time, non-seamless transfer, and high possibility of delay. This paper also discusses the improvement of these problems through certain adjustments on the timetable. The indices for evaluation and the adjustment method on timetable are then applied to a case study on the Hu-Ning-Hang railway in China, followed by the discussions of the merits of the proposed indices for timetable evaluation and possible improvement.

Cultural influences on IS service quality perceptions

While Information services function’s (ISF) service quality is not a new concept and has received considerable attention for over two decades, cross-cultural research of ISF’s service quality is not very mature. The author argues that the relationship between cultural dimensions and the ISF’s service quality dimensions may provide useful insights for how organisations should deal with different cultural groups. This paper will show that ISF’s service quality dimensions vary from one culture to another. The study adopts Hofstede’s (1980, 1991) typology of cultures and the “zones of tolerance” (ZOT) service quality measure reported by Kettinger & Lee (2005) as the primary commencing theory-base. In this paper, the author hypothesised and tested the influences of culture on users’ service quality perceptions and found strong empirical support for the study’s hypotheses. The results of this study indicate that as a result of their cultural characteristics, users vary in both their overall service quality perceptions and their perceptions on each of the four dimensions of ZOT service quality.

Co-creation in business service lifecycle management

Co-creation between customers and providers has recently gained more attention by business service providers as a promising endeavour. The different perspectives of co-creation - innovation, sourcing and marketing - are well deployed. From a provider’s point of view, the question of how to manage business services with respect to co-creation is vitally important. However, service engineering and service lifecycle management typically take a mostly internal, closed-loop approach, although a logical implication of acknowledging the value co-creation perspective on “service” would be to leverage customer and other stakeholder competences to the full extent. This paper aims at reconciling the perspectives of co-creation and makes a contribution by analysing where and how co-creation can be effectively utilised throughout the various stages of a generic business service lifecycle. The result will be a framework guiding companies in using co-creation when managing their business services.

Online service delivery models : an international comparison in the public sector

Governments around the world are facing the challenge of responding to increased expectations by their customers with regard to public service delivery. Citizens, for example, expect governments to provide better and more efficient electronic services on the Web in an integrated way. Online portals have become the approach of choice in online service delivery to meet these requirements and become more customer-focussed. This study describes and analyses existing variants of online service delivery models based upon an empirical study and provides valuable insights for researchers and practitioners in government. For this study, we have conducted interviews with senior management representatives from five international governments. Based on our findings, we distinguish three different classes of service delivery models. We describe and characterise each of these models in detail and provide an in-depth discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches.