Essays on E-Service Management: IT Servitization Under SOA and CRM Domains

Abstract

We are living in a world of service economy. Global markets have radically transformed from product-based industrial structures to service-based post-industrial ones over the past fifty years. IT has catalyzed a significant portion of this transformation. Advances in IT have not only alleviated the accessibility of existing service systems, but also enabled Servitization of products and commodities that were delivered through traditional mediums. Ironically, IT itself has been a commodity that has met its own share of Servitization. Hardware computing resources have been virtualized, whereas software and media content have been delivered through distributed networks. Causing a paradigm shift on how IT is delivered and used, Servitization of IT is expected to impose technical, economical and managerial challenges in various business domains of organizations. In this dissertation, I develop novel methods and policies to overcome such challenges. By conducting four closely related studies, I address common IT Servitization problems encountered in the service-oriented architecture and customer relationship management domains. Specifically, I make the following contributions: (1) in study one, I work on the efficient creation of software services out of legacy software by annotating source code components of an IT system with business semantics. The approach facilitates source code reuse in developing new web services. (2) In study two, I develop a financial valuation model for SOA investments. The model quantifies evident and elusive costs and benefits of SOA and supports managerial decision making regarding the investment. (3) In study three, I investigate the deployment of live-chat online service channels by evaluating the impact of priority-based admission control policies. I show that under imperfect profiling of customer types, reserve-type admission control policies may have negative consequences for the entire system. (4) In study four, I investigate the value of adding flexibility in live-chat contact centers. Contrary to the service management literature, I find out that cross-training of agents in large contact centers suffers from switching costs as well as capacity shifting inefficiencies. Methods, models and policies proposed in this dissertation are expected to contribute towards understanding the short-term applicability and long-term impact of service-orientation and IT Servitization in business organizations.