Calls for papers

 

International Journal of Services Technology and Management

 

Special Issue on: “Service Transformation Coherence and Roadmap”

Guest Editor: Raymond Wu, IBM Software Group, Asean, Singapore

Service transformation is one of the big challenges in this century from a scale and complexity perspective. The main objective is to increase service levels and revenues, enhance customer satisfaction, productivity and profitability, and reduce operating expenses. It requires multi-dimensional approaches from business innovation, service strategy, solution architecture, implementation and integration. Therefore, alignment, coherence and a roadmap are very important.

The transformation itself is crucial as the service concept is changing rapidly, while the coherence and roadmap are also critical as most of the service providers and vendors still lack of meta-level enterprise vision in consolidating a silo-approach into a global roadmap; this implied mis-alignment between direction (value and context), strategy (innovation, solution and architecture) and execution (implementation, integration and roadmap) causes a weak driving force toward global compliance. Thus, the service terminology and concept regarding different aspects (i.e. customer centric, master service data, single customer view, service insight, portal service, service channel consolidation, call centre agent etc) do not have enough visibility to see how they relate to and impact on each other.

As an example, a product-based vendor wished to transform its key business to services and make the transition from product-focused to solution-focused, to increase service revenues and reposition the brand. The company did everything right except that the “customer insight” required to join all visions from business, IT and service consumer, was neglected. In addition, the meta level inconsistency between product and service caused defects in service provisioning.

The company did it well in multi-channel, call centre and all other “run-time” services. However, as the transformation did not contribute the prediction and intelligence foundation in “customer service insight” (due to data fragmentation in meta transition), the service mediation does not provide a precise service to right person therefore sees losses to their competition. Once we see coherence from different aspects of service transformation, the global transformation roadmap will be much clearer.

This special issue of IJSTM encourages theoretical and empirical researchers to provide vision and manuscripts on any method or model of fundamental, interference mechanisms and coherence analysis of different aspects leading to a roadmap.

Subject Coverage
Suitable topics include but are not limited to:

• Methodology and approach (in achieving coherence of service transformation)
• Reference architecture and framework (for global practice of service compliance)
• Generic foundation (for building up a global service transformation repository)
• Industry specific solution (or practice in achieving smooth service transformation)
• Theoretical modelling (in service use case and their support using technology)
• Macro analysis (of service transformation bottleneck from economy, culture and technology)
• Integrated solution (in service transformation in either sector or service group specific)
• Pre-build foundation and preparation (in service transformation)

Notes for Prospective Authors

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere

All papers are refereed through a peer review process. A guide for authors, sample copies and other relevant information for submitting papers are available on the Author Guidelines page

Important Dates

Manuscript due: 1 December, 2006

Notification due: 15 February, 2007