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Network slicing enables communication service providers to partition physical infrastructure into logically independent networks. Network slices must be provisioned to meet the service-level objectives (SLOs) of disparate offerings, such as enhanced mobile broadband, ultrareliable low-latency communications, and massive machine-type communications. Network orchestrators must customize service placement and scaling to achieve the SLO of each network slice. In this article, we discuss the challenges encountered by network orchestrators in allocating resources to disparate 5G network slices, and propose the use of artificial intelligence to make core placement and scaling decisions that meet the requirements of network slices deployed on shared infrastructure. We explore how artificial intelligence-driven scaling algorithms, coupled with functionality-aware placement, can enable providers to design closed-loop solutions to meet the disparate SLOs of future network slices.

Globalization has brought many changes in modern business world. Problems of enterprise-oriented software applications like distribution and configuration of resources presents challenge to the traditional software sales model. Cloud computing presents the solution for such problems. With the help of cloud-based model one can earn good return by making the QoS demands of their users (customers) satisfied. In order to fulfill the infrastructure demands (like network, storage, etc.) to their users, service providers have to maintain their own hardware or they lease it from the Iaa S providers. For maintaining their own hardware SaaS providers will have to incur an extra cost, but if taken on lease, zero maintenance cost involved. Moreover, if provider wants to optimize cost and gain customer satisfaction, they will have to satisfy their customers/users by maintaining service level objectives. This paper presents a model for resource allocation in such a way as to minimize cost and maximize profit by satisfying the service level needs of the customers. The model is designed to enable the service providers with an ability to cope with the changing needs of customers, mapping customer requests to infrastructure level parameters and better handling of heterogeneous VMs.

In the previous chapter, I introduced services and explained how they are distributed using dependency injection. When using dependency injection, the objects that are used to resolve dependencies are created by service providers, known more commonly as providers. In this chapter, I explain how providers work, describe the different types of provider that are available, and demonstrate how providers can be created in different parts of the application to change the way that services behave. Table 20-1 puts providers in context.

Service Level Objectives (SLOs) allow defining expected performance of cloud services, such that cloud service providers know what they guarantee and service consumers know what to expect. Most approaches focus on low-level SLOs, closely related to resources, e.g., average CPU or memory usage, and are usually bound to specific elasticity controllers. We present SLO Script, a language and accompanying framework, motivated by real-world, industrial needs to allow service providers to define complex, high-level SLOs in an orchestrator-independent manner. The main features of SLO Script include: i) novel abstractions (StronglyTypedSLO) with type safety features, ensuring compatibility between SLOs and elasticity strategies, ii) abstractions that enable decoupling of SLOs from elasticity strategies, iii) a strongly typed metrics API, and iv) an orchestrator-independent object model that enables language extensibility. We present a case study about a real-world, cloud-native application and evaluate our language while implementing a realistic Cost Efficiency SLO.

Today"s world economy is becoming more of service oriented. This situation can be attributed to the increased importance and significance being witnessed in the service industry by both the developed and the developing economies of the world. In fact, growth in the service sector is often used as an indicator to measure a country"s economic growth. The service industry has since become the main stay of the economy of many nations. The service industry offers services to customers. These customers often expect value for their money. Customer satisfaction is of equal importance in the service industry just like in the product related business. Three forces dominate the prevailing marketing environment in the service sector increasing competition from private players, changing and improving technologies and continuous shifts in the regulatory environment, which has led to the growing customer sophistication. Customers have become more and more aware of their requirements and demand higher standards of services. Their perceptions and expectations are continually evolving, making it difficult for the service providers to measure and manage services effectively. The key lies in improving the service selectively, paying attention to more critical service attributes/dimensions as a part of customer service management. It is an imperative to understand how sensitive the customers are to various service attributes or dimensions. Allocating resources in the fashion that is consistent with customer priorities can enhance the effectiveness in the service operations. In addition, customer service attribute priorities need to be fully explored in service specific contexts. This paper is an attempt to explore relative importance of service quality dimensions across a "select" service context.

QoS-aware service selection seeks to find the optimal service providers to achieve the optimization goal of a service requester, such as the maximization of utility, while satisfying global QoS requirements. Service providers are usually self-interested and have some private information, such as minimum prices, that would significantly factor into the decision making of the service requester. Thus, service requesters face a decision making dilemma with incomplete information. Recent work has used iterative combinatorial auctions to address this problem. However, such studies do not sufficiently consider that the service requester can elicit the private information from service providers by observing their actions. This can help the service selection process achieve better outcomes. In this paper, we propose a type of incentive contract that can motivate the service providers to offer the QoS and prices that the service requester prefers. Based on the incentive contracts, we propose an incentive mechanism for effective service selection. In the mechanism, a service requester offers a set of incentive contracts to the service providers and then elicits their private information based on their responses to the incentive contracts. The process is iterated until the service requester finally obtains a solution that fulfills the global QoS requirements. Experimental results show that the incentive contracts have a positive impact on both service requesters and providers and that the incentive mechanism outperforms the existing combinatorial auction-based approaches in finding optimal solutions.

As Internet applications have become more diverse in recent years, users having heavy demand for online video services are more willing to pay higher prices for better services than light users that mainly use e-mails and instant messages. This encourages the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to explore service differentiations so as to optimize their profits and allocation of network resources. Much prior work has focused on the viability of network service differentiation by comparing with the case of a single-class service. However, the optimal service differentiation for an ISP subject to resource constraints has remained unsolved. In this work, we establish an optimal control framework to derive the analytical solution to an ISP's optimal service differentiation, i.e., the optimal service qualities and associated prices. By analyzing the structures of the solution, we reveal how an ISP should adjust the service qualities and prices in order to meet varying capacity constraints and users' characteristics. We also obtain the conditions under which ISPs have strong incentives to implement service differentiation and whether regulators should encourage such practices.

Security is one of the key considerations when businesses look to adopt cloud models like Platform as a Service (PaaS). The main concern comes from the fact that business losses total control of deployed applications and data, leaving that trust in the hands of the Cloud Service Providers (CSP). Although CSPs put some level of security controls in place, it is ultimately the responsibility of the client to verify the presence of the controls and verify the suitability of their security needs. It is also the user's responsibility to ascertain compliance with these offerings to appropriate standards before patronage. This paper reviewed various security issues inherent in the PaaS cloud model, classified them according to the essential cloud characteristics and finally recommended high-level solutions to the identified security issues. The result of the review and recommendations provided can serve as a reference for organizations and individual users when deciding security needs and service level objectives for PaaS based deployments.

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) becomes the primary driver for the evolution of 5G networks, and in recent years, Network Function Cloudification (NFC) proved to be an inevitable part of this evolution. Microservice architecture also becomes the de facto choice for designing a modern Cloud Native Network Function (CNF) due to its ability to decouple components of each CNF into multiple independently manageable microservices. Even though taking advantage of microservice architecture in designing CNFs solves specific problems, this additional granularity makes estimating resource requirements for a Production Environment (PE) a complex task and sometimes leads to an over-provisioned PE. Traditionally, performance engineers dimension each CNF within a Service Function Chain (SFC) in a smaller Performance Testing Environment (PTE) through a series of performance benchmarks. Then, considering the Quality of Service (QoS) constraints of a Service Provider (SP) that are guaranteed in the Service Level Agreement (SLA), they estimate the required resources to set up the PE. In this paper, we used a machine learning approach to model the impact of each microservice's resource configuration (i.e., CPU and memory) on the QoS metrics (i.e. serving throughput and latency) of each SFC in a PTE. Then, considering an SP's Service Level Objectives (SLO), we proposed an algorithm to predict each microservice's resource capacities in a PE. We evaluated the accuracy of our prediction on a prototype of a cloud native 5G Home Subscriber Server (HSS). Our model showed 95%-78% accuracy in a PE that has 2–5 times more computing resources than the PTE.

Network function virtualization (NFV) technology attracts tremendous interests from telecommunication industry and data center operators, as it allows service providers to assign resource for Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) on demand, achieving better flexibility, programmability, and scalability. To improve server utilization, one popular practice is to deploy best effort (BE) workloads along with high priority (HP) VNFs when high priority VNF's resource usage is detected to be low. The key challenge of this deployment scheme is to dynamically balance the Service level objective (SLO) and the total cost of ownership (TCO) to optimize the data center efficiency under inherently fluctuating workloads. With the recent advancement in deep reinforcement learning, we conjecture that it has the potential to solve this challenge by adaptively adjusting resource allocation to reach the improved performance and higher server utilization. In this paper, we present a closed-loop automation system RLDRM11RLDRM: Reinforcement Learning Dynamic Resource Management to dynamically adjust Last Level Cache allocation between HP VNFs and BE workloads using deep reinforcement learning. The results demonstrate improved server utilization while maintaining required SLO for the HP VNFs.

Web service is a functionality which is accessed through the internet. Different service providers offer same functionality which has increased the efficiency of service to a great amount.The customers have to access by selecting web services.The goal is to find the appropriate web services that fulfill the customer requirements. Service selection is the process of selecting the most suitable service from the list of discovered services. This process is usually based on the metrics like Quality of Services(QoS) and are ranked based on the QoS values using four service selection techniques namely Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Logic Scoring Preference (LSP), Fuzzy Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (Fuzzy Topsis) and Web service relevancy factor (WsRF). Inappropriate service selection leads to many complications which in turn require an evaluation scheme for adopting a distinct method. The performance evaluation of the service selection methods is carried out using analysis of variance (ANOVA). To improve the performance of service selection, the Iterative MapReduce is used. This reduces the execution time of the each selection process by running the process parallel.

When a single service on its own cannot fulfill a sophisticated application, a composition of services is required. Existing methods mostly use a fixed-price scheme for service pricing and determine service allocation for composition based on a first-price auction. However, in a dynamic service market, it is difficult for service providers to determine a fixed price that is profitable while attractive to customers. Meanwhile, this mechanism cannot ensure that the providers who require the least cost to provide services would win the auction, because the pricing strategy of service providers is unpredictable. To address such issues, in this paper, we propose Vickrey–Clarke–Groves auction-based dynamic pricing for a generalized service composition. We consider fine-grained services as candidates for composition as well as coarse-grained ones. In our approach, service providers bid for services of different granularities in the composite service and based on received bids, a user decides a composition that minimizes the social cost while meeting quality constraints. Experimental results at last verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach. Note to Practitioners —Motivated by the popular auction-based dynamic pricing in the modern Internet business, this paper proposes a Vickrey–Clarke–Groves auction-based approach for multigranularity service composition in order to overcome the shortcomings of existing approaches, e.g., unpredictability in service pricing, and lack of economic efficiency. The proposed approach instantiates a composite service in an economically efficient way and it offers service providers with the incentives to honestly declare the true costs of their concrete services in the bids. In the experiments, compared with fine-grained service composition, the proposed approach reduces the social cost and user payment of service composition by 6.8% and 11.2% on average, respectively, and it also shows superiority over the first-price auction-based approach.

Service Reporting is an essential part of Service Level Management (SLM) in IT Service Management (ITSM). These SLM reports show Service Quality status in compare to Service Level Target (SLT) based on Service Level Agreement (SLA). However, producing Technical Service Reports (TSRs) for SLM has Data Quality (DQ) challenges when IT services of a large enterprise are outsourced to a large IT service provider (ITSP). In fact, sources of technical metrics in these reports are coming from huge, unverified and non-normalized system-generated events and logs in a large enterprise environment. In addition, there are lacks of configuration items and service information meta-data that are essential for producing these SLM reports. These challenges lead to low intrinsic and contextual DQ of reports that destroy customer’s trust and management visibility which lead to Service Quality (SQ) issues and financial penalties. This research used Action Design Research (ADR) methodology and insider participant observation, focus group, interview and questionnaire data gathering and content analysis. Design, actions and data collection are done in and from a Multi-National Company (MNC) in Malaysia that provides IT services to one of the top 10 biggest enterprises in the world, during 4 years of research. The research implemented artifact is an integrated reporting system. It used Feedback Control System (FCS) theory and ITSM concepts to create Reports Data Quality Improvement Loop (RDQIL) to improve TSRs’ DQ. The research output is an ensemble artifact which formalized in the class of problems, class of solutions and set of design principles that consist of new Hybrid Normalize Data Warehouse (HNDW) architecture and Integrated Feedback Control Reporting (IFCR) process model. The importance of research emerges by improving SQ and reducing the risks of financial penalties by providing complex event processing and service reporting integrated into Operation processes. The research’s design principles and IFCR process model create RDQIL that improves TSRs’ DQ in large ITSPs which lead SQ improvement and prevent financial penalties.

© 2017 Elsevier Ltd In today's competitive world, service providers need to be customer-focused and proactive in their marketing strategies to create consumer awareness of their services. Cloud computing provides an open and ubiquitous computing feature in which a large random number of consumers can interact with providers and request services. In such an environment, there is a need for intelligent and efficient methods that increase confidence in the successful achievement of business requirements. One such method is the Service Level Agreement (SLA), which is comprised of service objectives, business terms, service relations, obligations and the possible action to be taken in the case of SLA violation. Most of the emphasis in the literature has, until now, been on the formation of meaningful SLAs by service consumers, through which their requirements will be met. However, in an increasingly competitive market based on the cloud environment, service providers too need a framework that will form a viable SLA, predict possible SLA violations before they occur, and generate early warning alarms that flag a potential lack of resources. This is because when a provider and a consumer commit to an SLA, the service provider is bound to reserve the agreed amount of resources for the entire period of that agreement – whether the consumer uses them or not. It is therefore very important for cloud providers to accurately predict the likely resource usage for a particular consumer and to formulate an appropriate SLA before finalizing an agreement. This problem is more important for a small to medium cloud service provider which has limited resources that must be utilized in the best possible way to generate maximum revenue. A viable SLA in cloud computing is one that intelligently helps the service provider to determine the amount of resources to offer to a requesting consumer, and there are number of studies on SLA management in the literature. The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, it presents a comprehensive overview of existing state-of-the-art SLA management approaches in cloud computing, and their features and shortcomings in creating viable SLAs from the service provider's viewpoint. From a thorough analysis, we observe that the lack of a viable SLA management framework renders a service provider unable to make wise decisions in forming an SLA, which could lead to service violations and violation penalties. To fill this gap, our second contribution is the proposal of the Optimized Personalized Viable SLA (OPV-SLA) framework which assists a service provider to form a viable SLA and start managing SLA violation before an SLA is formed and executed. The framework also assists a service provider to make an optimal decision in service formation and allocate the appropriate amount of marginal resources. We demonstrate the applicability of our framework in forming viable SLAs through experiments. From the evaluative results, we observe that our framework helps a service provider to form viable SLAs and later to manage them to effectively minimize possible service violation and penalties.

As emerging markets have been playing more and more important roles in the global outsourcing markets, many companies from industrialized countries started to outsource various complex business processes oversea intending to take advantage of talented workforce at low cost. In this study, we focus on the challenging aspects and identify complex relationships that exist in the professional service outsourcing context from the service provider's perspective. Building on information processing theory, this paper aims to explain how task characteristics affect performance differently through a service provider's customer orientation and client integration. The unbalanced effects identified in this study influence the service provider's performance contradictorily and largely contribute to those unsatisfied results in professional service outsourcing. Using survey data from 192 Indian professional service providers, we find that both service provider's customer orientation and client integration are positively associated with its performance, while the impacts of two task characteristics (complexity and security) on customer orientation and client integration are in opposite direction. The unbalanced effects raise challenges in properly managing tasks to enhance performance. This study contributes to the much-needed efforts in the study of professional service outsourcing, a new and fast growing cross-border professional service activity. Managerial implications are also drawn from our study to practicing global clients and offshore service providers on how to successfully manage inter-organizational relations in outsourcing process to achieve expected benefits.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to determine the impact of an additional service on existing consumers’ usage of existing services from the same service provider. Research has often focused on marketers’ efforts to sell new offerings to existing customers. However, does the consumption of these new offerings by existing customers affect their usage of the firm’s existing services? This research examines this question in the context of a subscription service. Design/methodology/approach This study uses matched consumer- and firm-level data from a leading telecom service provider in India. These data include responses from 230 consumers, as well as details on their usage of existing and additional services. The data are analyzed using three-stage least squares regressions while controlling for consumers’ past usage of the existing services. Findings The results indicate that existing consumers’ cross-buying of the new service results in a reduction of their future usage of existing services. Most consumers also managed to maintain their monthly payments constant, even though they had subscribed to the new service. Together, these findings imply that consumers reallocate their budget by reducing their usage of existing services to accommodate the usage of an additional service from the same service provider. Consequently, the revenue of the firm might not always increase when the consumer cross-buys an additional service from the firm. Originality/value Marketing research on cross-buying has so far neglected to look at the effects of existing consumers’ adoption of an additional service on existing services of the service provider. This study focused on this gap in knowledge, in the context of subscription services. Using consumers’ perceptions and matched service usage data, the authors extend the literature that tries to understand why cross-buying may not be beneficial to the firm in certain service settings.

A service provider/retailer offers ancillary service (e.g., shipping by an online retailer) to two types of customers, impatient and patient, who may be heterogeneous both in their delay sensitivities and service valuations. She can use prioritization and/or strategic delay to differentiate them by offering two service classes and charging different prices, potentially resulting in a split in which a single customer type selects both the classes. Her objective is to minimize cost while satisfying individual rationality and incentive compatibility conditions. We characterize the optimal solutions under both exogenous and endogenous capacities. We examine the conditions under which the following strategically important features of service delivery are optimal, and relate them to practical scenarios: (i) free service, (ii) single/differentiated service, (iii) split of customers, and (iv) strategic delay. We find that the presence of these features depends on (i) whether the retailer has limited or sufficient capacity and (ii) whether she sells fashion goods or staple products. A typical explanation for offering free service is that it increases demand from customers. We make an operational case for it by showing that even if demand does not change, free service is still optimal under some scenarios.

As a typical sustainable product-service system, the aero-engine overhaul service aims to recover the functionality to fulfil certain flight hours and thrust requirements. How to configure the overhaul service with various sub-services is a key issue in industry. In this paper, a use-oriented aero-engine overhaul service configuration approach is proposed with two methods: overhaul service configuration and part repair service configuration. The overhaul service configuration method decomposes the overhaul service into various sub-services and creates a hierarchical service tree model, taking the cost and energy consumption into consideration. Based on the sub-service filtering and selection rule, the bill of exchange service comes with the bill of discard service. The part repair service configuration method matches each part repair procedure service with a proper service provider. Some non-dominated bills of repair services are obtained by minimizing the repair service cost, finishing time deviation and energy consumption. Considering the multi-objective character of the overhaul service configuration problem, these two methods result in some Pareto solutions to fulfil the service requirements. Through implementing the approach as a prototype, a case study is shown to illustrate the use-oriented aero-engine overhaul service configuration approach and verify its feasibility. A bridge between the flight hours and thrust requirements and the overhaul service configuration results is built when the cost and energy consumption are minimized. The study contributes to the shift of aero-engine overhaul services from the add-on services to sustainable use-oriented product-service systems. The research is under the support of the Natural Science Basic Research Plan in Shaanxi Province of China (Program No. 2013JM7001) and the “National Natural Science Foundation of China” (NSFC, No. 50805122). This research is also supported in part by the Mistra REES (Resource Efficient and Effective Solutions) program funded by MISTRA, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research (No. 2014/16) and the Circularis (Circular Economy through Innovating Design) project funded by VINNOVA, Sweden’s Innovation Agency (No. 2016-03267). The authors wish to express their deep appreciation to the practitioners involved in the case study for their support.

Many goods manufacturers and service providers jointly deliver partnered hybrid offerings to achieve competitive advantage and superior performance. In such cases, service providers may emphasize different aspects of service in their offerings. Do service providers and goods manufacturers benefit equally from emphasizing service satisfaction? Do the performance effects of emphases on different aspects of service satisfaction vary across different goods? The authors examine the effects of emphases on two aspects of service satisfaction, relational service (interactions with the service provider’s staff) and service environment (service provider’s facilities), on the market shares of service and goods components of partnered hybrid offerings. Using multiple secondary data sources from the U.S. automobile industry between 2009 and 2015, the authors find that emphasizing relational service satisfaction increases service market share but decreases goods market share. Counterintuitively, emphasizing ser...

With the cooperation between hospitals and advanced technologies such as mobile Internet, big data and cloud computing, emerging technologies and new service models have been applied in precaution, diagnosis, treatment and other medical services. As a result, people’s medical practices have been dramatically changed. On the basis of activity theory and service supply chain, the paper discusses hospital’s innovation in medical, health and care service by using cloud computing. It also explores the model and evolution of hospital’s internal activity and external supply chain.Cases in this paper from the year 2000 till now are our secondary data related to the cloud service innovation in hospitals. The study adopts textual analysis to interpret and analyze the data. Then, in-depth interviews would be taken on the basis of analytical result. Through the above-mentioned process, we find that homogeneities between different cases include treatment service cloud ranking first, community as the main promoter, substantial service innovation being emphasized, care service cloud as future trend, service innovation featured client-service model, eight procedures for service supply chain, improvement of suppliers’ self-design, and pluralism of medical care service etc. Differences of the cases include government policies versus industrial policies, multipoint distribution versus centralized organizational structure, regional institutionalization versus large-scale centralization, Substantive services application versus development of service value, market orientation versus industry orientation, service provider orientation versus service design orientation, physical customer versus invisible customer. In the end, the study offers relevant theories, management implications, and recommendations.

In the world of large-scale applications, software-as-a-service (SaaS) in general and use of micro-services, in particular, is bringing service-oriented architectures (SOA) to a new level: systems in general and systems that interact with human users (e.g., socio-technical systems) in particular are built by composing micro-services that are developed independently and operated by different parties. At the same time, SaaS applications are used more and more widely by enterprises as well as public services for providing critical services, including those processing security or privacy of relevant data. Therefore providing secure and reliable service compositions is increasingly needed to ensure the success of SaaS solutions. Building such service compositions securely, is still an unsolved problem. In this paper, we present a framework for modelling, validating, and ranking secure service compositions that integrate both automated services as well as services that interact with humans. As a unique feature, our approach for ranking services integrates validated properties (e. g., based on the result of formally analysing the source code of a service implementation) as well as contractual properties that are part of the service- level-agreement and, thus, not necessarily ensured on a technical level.

Co-opetition refers to the phenomenon that firms simultaneously cooperate and compete in order to maximize their profits. This paper studies the contracting for an outsourcing supply chain (a user company vs. a service provider) in the presence of co-opetition and information asymmetry. The user company outsources part of his service capacity at a discount price to the service provider for sale. The service provider charges a commission for doing outsourcing work and competes with the user company for the service capacity to satisfy their respective demands. We solve for the service provider’s optimal commission decision and the user company’s optimal outsourcing decisions (outsourcing volume and price discount) when the user company has private information about his service capacity. Specifically, we highlight the following observations. For the service provider, a menu of two-part tariffs that consist of a fixed commission and a per-volume commission can reveal the true type of the user company’s capacity; the user company’s optimal outsourcing proportion is quasi-convex and the optimal price discount is non-decreasing in his capacity volume, which is counterintuitive.

We study the pricing and capacity allocation problem of a service provider who serves two distinct customer classes. Customers in each class are inherently heterogeneous in their willingness to pay for service, but their utilities are also affected by the presence of other customers in the system. Specifically, customer utilities depend on how many customers are in the system at the time of service as well as who these other customers are. We find that if the service provider can price discriminate between customer classes, pricing out a class, i.e., operating an exclusive system, can sometimes be optimal and depends only on classes’ perceptions of each other. If the provider must charge a single price, an exclusive system is even more likely. We extend our analysis to a service provider who can prevent class interaction by allocating separate capacity segments to the two customer classes. Under price discrimination, allocating capacity is optimal if the “net appreciation” between classes, as defined in the paper, is negative. However, under a single-price policy, allocating capacity can be optimal even if this net appreciation is positive. We describe in detail how the nature of asymmetry in classes’ perception of each other determines the optimal strategy. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2016.0606 .

Social service items are increasing with social demands so that various social welfare institutions are rapidly developing. In the educational environment, the teacher is the service provider and t...

The perceived level of public service quality and customer satisfaction may be improved by the customer-oriented behaviour of the service provider. The desired external orientation of public service provision requires marketing based modelling. In order to measure the market orientation of the municipal service provision companies and to test the casual relationships proposed by the research model the survey method is employed. The sample is analysed by confirmatory principal component analysis and relationships are tested by linear regression analysis as well as correlation analyses. According to the results of this study market orientation plays a significant role in public sector by positively influencing customer satisfaction and service quality. There is evidence that intelligence gathering by front line employees and response action elaboration play crucial roles in the service provision, which points on the importance of staff. Findings also suggest that in the municipal service provision of Hungary the market orientation is highly supported by the commitment of staff and team spirit, while market turbulence, political influence and organizational conflict have reverse impacts. The findings also show that the salient internal antecedent factor of market orientation is interdepartmental connectedness rather than top managements’ emphasis. Based on the study it is to conclude that the focus on political initiatives by the management of the public service providers generates performance loss in customers’ dimensions.

Cloud computing is an emerging field aimed at providing any type of service on demand -anywhere, and anytime. Advances in this field have facilitated a futuristic collaborative cloud in which many inter-connected clouds provide scalable services. A request processed by an untrustworthy provider can endanger quality of service, prompting the dissatisfaction of the customer. This paper aims to select the Trustworthy Service Provider (TSP) by evaluating trust based on in-context feedback from different sources; these sources include customer feedback, global advisory feedback and third-party feedback. Furthermore, unfair feedback is filtered to improve accuracy. Consequently, the job-success rate increases, and customers are able to obtain value-for-money for the sum paid toward selection of a provider. The present experimental work proves that the proposed model is effective and efficient in selecting a trustworthy provider in a collaborative environment.

Over the last approximately 20 years, the pharmaceutical industry has increasingly outsourced its research and development activities, including pharmacovigilance, with mixed results. To avoid significant failures, both clients and service providers should understand and openly discuss each other’s needs, avoiding the unrealistic expectations often elicited prior to signing a contract. Clients should ensure the outsourced project is adequately resourced in terms of time allocated to it and the skills and expertise of those who will do the actual work and training. They should recognise that quality can be compromised by cheapness and that a service provider’s physical distance and cultural difference are likely to interfere with communication and reciprocal understanding. Clients should always have a person in house who has a good knowledge of pharmacovigilance, so as to understand each activity in detail. This person should be involved in discussions with the service provider, assessing the support and information that the service provider requires, reviewing the vendor’s work, providing continuous feedback and avoiding confrontation by focussing on the needs and challenges the service provider is facing.

Purpose Despite increasing interest in offshoring of knowledge-intensive services, it is still undetermined as to whether the sourcing of services truly creates the anticipated value for clients. Moreover, even less is known about whether value is created for service providers in the process beyond the general service trade. This lack of knowledge is due to the challenges of capturing value creation, the unique production process of the services, and the impact of offshoring on both value creation and the production process. The purpose of this paper is to study offshored service production processes of knowledge-intensive services in order to identify direct and indirect value creation for clients as well as service providers in the process. Design/methodology/approach The paper applies a multiple case study method and studies one conglomerate with three offshored service production processes. The chosen method allows for the investigation of the service production process and indirect/direct value creation within the process. Findings The study finds that there is direct value creation for the client and the service provider towards the end of the production processes as expected. However, more importantly, it finds additional indirect value creation in various production stages. The indirect value is reflected in enhanced understanding of problems and own operations for the client and increased knowledge about clients and problem-solving approaches for the service provider. Research limitations/implications This study contributes to offshoring literature by providing a comprehensive understanding of value creation in service offshoring for clients as well as service providers. It also contributes to the service management literature as a study of direct and indirect value creation in services, particularly within the production process of the services. Practical implications The study allows practitioners to gain insights on the value creation logic of offshored services and the value created beyond that logic. More specifically, it allows client firms to gain details of various values and benefits of service offshoring and service provider firms to gain a focused perspective on value creation in their own service production that can lead to competitive advantages. Originality/value The paper is novel and original through its approach to study offshoring from a value creation logic perspective, including not only the client but also the service provider perspective. It also applies a service production process perspective that is novel in offshoring literature.

In service-oriented architecture, a web service evolves over time. Changes in a service may affect the quality of service for the service provider as well as for the service consumer. The quality of a service is measured from its structural perspective and therefore the proposed metrics are defined considering the web service description language document of a service. In this paper, a suite of metrics consisting of service evolution metric, service client-code evolution metric and service usefulness evolution metric has been proposed which measures service evolution for the service provider, impact of service evolution on the client code and on the usefulness for the service consumer. The time complexity of the proposed metrics is linear. The study of correlation between these metrics is conducted which indicates to the service provider whether the changes made in the service have tangible benefits for the consumer. To show the applicability of the metrics, real world data as well as simulated data has been used. Zuse framework has been used to theoretically validate the metrics. All the metrics are above the ordinal scale.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify service quality dimensions and their sub-dimensions for mobile government services. Despite studies conducted on mobile services, there is lack of a comprehensive framework of mobile government service quality. Researchers and practitioners must outline a taxonomy of mobile government service quality before they can begin to test their effects empirically. It cannot be assumed that e-government is the same as m-government. Therefore, it is important to understand the dimensions that affect mobile government service quality. Design/methodology/approach Mobile government service quality dimensions were extracted from the literature on m-government from its development and transition from e-government to service models being used. This helps understand what service quality dimensions are necessary when creating more efficient, reliable, and responsible forms of m-government. The dimensions are demonstrated within a holistic framework of m-government service quality, presented for both academic and practitioner appreciation. Findings This paper identifies 20 mobile government service quality sub-dimensions classified within six dimensions. Originality/value The literature on mobile government service quality is scarce. With the expectation of mobile subscriptions worldwide reaching 8 billion by 2016, it is the most lucrative time to be researching how the design of mobile government affects service quality. This paper is the first to provide information on m-government service quality dimensions available for assessment.

Waiting has been a significant concern for healthcare services. We address this issue in the context of a two-tier service system in this study. A two-tier healthcare service system consists of two different service providers, typically one public service provider and one private service provider. In a baseline model, the two service providers are modeled by two queue servers, which charge each patient a common fixed fee for the service. Then, we study a queue model in which one service provider offers a subsidy or charges a premium while the other maintains the fixed service fee. This system provides a mechanism to segment patients along their waiting time cost through price discrimination. We analyze the problem from both the perspective of minimizing total waiting cost for all patients and the perspective of maximizing social gain for the public service provider or profit for the private service provider. We show that this model can significantly alleviate the burden of waiting for patients. The study addresses the design, the efficiency, and the implementation of two-tier healthcare service systems. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Purpose Services marketing research continues to be largely focused on firms’ reactive interactions for recovering from service failure rather than on proactive customer interactions that may prevent service failure from occurring in the first place. Building on previous studies that assess the efficacy of implementing proactive interaction in service provision contexts, the purpose of this paper is to compare the influences of proactive interaction to prevent service failure and reactive interaction to correct service failure on customer emotion and patronage behavior. Since proactive interaction for service failure prevention is a relatively underexplored and resource-intensive approach, the authors also assess the moderating influences of customer and firm-related characteristics. Design/methodology/approach The study hypotheses are tested with survey data from two scenario-based experiments conducted in a retail setting. Findings The findings reveal that customers prefer service providers that take the initiative to get to them before they have to initiate contact for themselves. The findings also identify the moderating influences of relationship quality, situational involvement, and contact person status and motive. Originality/value The research contributes to the development of service provision theory and practice by expanding on previous studies which report that proactive efforts to prepare customers for the adverse effects of service failure are favorably received. The results also shed light on moderating factors that may further inform the exploitation of resource-intensive proactive interaction for service failure prevention. An agenda is proposed to stimulate future research on proactive customer interaction to prevent service failure in service provision contexts.

The aim of this research is to identify the most effective public service management approaches for outsourced services. Our focus is on the phases of transition and service management post provider selection. To reach this aim, comparative case studies across sectors were conducted. The studied cases indicate that managing an outsourced service should not be a separate area of public management research nor practice, but rather a part of service management. Best practices in (outsourced) public service management are provided. Management focus on transition phase after provider selection, performance measurement, and evaluation will bring efficiency to public sector service production.

In this research, we discuss service value co-creation in welfare services, especially those for the disabled. A “Reciprocal Value Co-Creation Model” in which both service users and care workers in service providers create value and share in that value together is proposed. Furthermore, using a case study from L’Arche Kananoie, a care service provider for the intellectually-disabled, we will show the model in practice and show how this organization's service users and workers collaboratively create value such as “a place to belong,” “human growth,” and “a connection to society.”

In this study, the authors focus on how service providers can meet rising customer value expectations through service process designs that are not only lean but also with high service quality.

The main scientific objective of the article is to demonstrate, on the example of accommodation service, the possibility of applying the netnographic methodology and meme theory in the context of the analysis of the manner of perception of the quality of a service. The cause-and-effect relationship between the service quality and the formation of memetic transfer was defined, which, through the creation of specific consumer expectations, can contribute to the creation of a positive image of the service provider. The obtained results will provide a theoretical basis for an innovative model for the management of the quality of service.

10TH CIRP CONFERENCE ON INTELLIGENT COMPUTATION IN MANUFACTURING ENGINEERING - CIRP ICME '16. With the aim of providing a scientific methodology for studies of services, the value-creation model, which classifies service models in three classes on the basis of the relationships among service providers, was proposed in the 2000s. However, the model lacks formal criteria for classifying service models in scientific way. Therefore, in this study, we first consider the activity of service design as an activity of designing "service mechanism" in reference to mechanism design, which is an area in economics and game theory. Then, we develop formal criteria for the classification of the service mechanism based on the value-creation model.

A common practice while developing product services is to adopt procedures that could facilitate well-defined mapping of the stakeholder's requirements for the offered product services. A central theme of this research is to explore a few of those aspects which are typically not captured by traditional service development processes. This includes transition from stakeholder's needs to product services design like financial, marketing or customer relation targets and at the same level ensuring the balance between customer's satisfaction level and other stakeholder's expectations, thereby maintaining the comparative high-quality of offered services. In order to address this shortcoming in product service design, this paper proposes to employ a governance model by extending traditional service development process. Furthermore, a novel framework for industrial product service development is introduced, which consists of three process stages and takes into account the proposed governance model, along with product, process and resource models. This article also highlights some of key aspects which when considered in the governance model of our newly offered service design framework could allow service providers to tune services to optimal for individual needs.

The paper analyses its existing service blueprint along with recommends how the restaurant can enhance its quality service as well as efficiency level. Based on the semi-structured interview on the restaurant, a new service blueprint has been redesigned which limits the present and potential failure points in the existing process. High participation level from the customer along with service providers and employees will add a new value to the efficiency level of the service quality.

Since globalization has changed markets and the competitive situation, services are taking up an increasingly important role for manufacturing companies. Extending the service area accordingly offers the opportunity to develop new market potentials as well as increasing long term customer loyalty. One approach that describes this development is Service Transition and the related goods-to-services continuum on which a manufacturing company moves. But the different influences and changes in the Service Transition to the individual subareas of the After Sales Service are not considered enough. The study presented in this paper shows that the effects of the changes caused by the Service Transition to the subareas of the After Sales Service vary widely. Future models dealing with the Service Transition of manufacturing companies should take these results into account. This is an appropriate way to develop and implement effective measures for the management of the Service Transition of manufacturing companies.

During the last years the use of service level agree-ments (SLA) is rising uncontrollably to describe the rights and obligations of parties involved in service provisioning (typically the service consumer and the service provider); amongst other information, SLA could define guarantees associated with the idea of service level objectives (SLOs) that normally represent key performance indicators of either the consumer or the provider. In case the guarantee is under or over fulfilled SLAs could also define some compensations (i.e. penalties or rewards). In such a context, there have been important steps towards the automation of the analysis of SLAs. One of these steps is a characterization model of SLAs with compensations proposed by the authors in a previous work; and another step is the standardisation effort in the SLAs notation made by WS‑Agreement. However, real-world SLAs includes complex concepts that must be considered, namely: (i) SLA terms that specify compensations without an explicit SLO; and (ii) a limit for the compensations. In this paper we extend our prior characterization model considering these complex concepts. Specifically, (i) we provide up to five real-world scenarios whose SLAs incorporate aforementioned new concepts; (ii) we extend our model for compensable guarantees considering terms without an explicit SLO; and (iii) we provide a novel WS‑Agreement-based syntax to model SLAs with compensations considering these concepts. These contributions aim to establish a foundation to elaborate tools that could provide an automated support to model and analyse SLAs with compensations.

A large and rapidly increasing number of services are offered through the Internet, in the cloud. This enables users to utilize services remotely, without even knowing the service provider. However, before putting their trust in a provider, users need to be able to evaluate how trustworthy a service is. This can be a daunting task, as many factors need to be considered and analyzed. The current paper aims at helping the selection of a service provider by presenting a taxonomy of trust factors and outlining its application in practical scenarios. A brief description of a framework built on this taxonomy is also given.

In many service settings, customers have to join the queue without being fully aware of the parameters of the service provider (e.g., customers at checkout counters may not know the true service rate before joining). In such “blind queues,” customers make their joining/balking decisions based on limited information about the service provider’s operational parameters (from past service experiences, reviews, etc.) and queue lengths. We analyze a firm serving customers making decisions under arbitrary beliefs about the service parameters in an observable queue for a service with a known price. By proposing an ordering for the balking threshold distributions in the customer population, we are able to compare the effects of customer beliefs on the queue. We show that, although revealing the service information to customers improves revenues under certain conditions, it may destroy consumer welfare or social welfare. Given a market size, consumer welfare can be significantly reduced when a fast server announces its true service parameter. When revenue is higher under some beliefs, one would expect the congestion to also be higher because more customers join, but we show that congestion may not necessarily increase. This paper was accepted by Teck-Hua Ho, stochastic models and simulation.

Purpose This study aims to extend service climate research from its existing focus on routine service for external clients into a knowledge-intensive, internal (KII) service setting. This extension was important because internal knowledge workers may operate from a monopolistic perspective and not view themselves as service providers because of the technical/professional nature of their work. Design/methodology/approach Two surveys were distributed in participating organizations. One survey, completed by employees in information technology (IT) service units, contains measures of service climate, climate antecedents and technical competence. The second survey, filled out by members of their corporate customer units, taps their evaluations of service quality. Findings Service climate in IT service units significantly predicted service evaluations by their respective customer units. Importantly, service climate was more predictive than IT service employees’ technical competency. Role ambiguity, empowerment and work facilitation were also found to be significant service climate antecedents. Research limitations/implications These results provided strong empirical evidence supporting an extension of the existing service climate research to KII service settings. To the extent that front-line service employees rely on internal support to deliver quality service to external customers, managers should work to enhance the service climate in internal support units, which ultimately improves external service quality. Originality/value This is the first study that establishes the robustness of the service climate construct in KII service settings. It makes service climate a useful managerial tool for improving both internal and external service quality.

The phenomenon of value creation is witnessing a shift towards value co-creation, particularly in collaborative relationship. This study explores and prioritizes drivers enabling value co-creation from the perspectives of client and service provider in the context of IT-services outsourcing. An extensive literature review and subsequent pilot study suggest six probable value drivers that are further, statistically validated and prioritized. The unit of analysis is front-line professionals, working with either party. A web-based survey was administered to collect data from 256 respondents, drawn using judgemental sampling. Strategic Intent and Service Actualization are found to be significant and common value drivers for both parties (client and service provider), though with different priorities. The other significant value drivers are found to be Collective Capabilities for client and Intrapreneurship for service provider (these value drivers are not common to the client and service provider). This study reiterates and crystallizes the understanding of value co-creation process in the context of IT-services outsourcing. The identified drivers would enable practitioners to understand and to reconcile the drivers for client(s) and service provider(s) in order to realize the respective value outcome. The commonality of two value drivers; strategic intent and service actualization for both clients and service providers indicates the opportunity for co-creation of value.

Quality of service (QoS) determines the service usability and utility and both of which influence the service selection process. The QoS varies from one service provider to other. Each web service has its own methodology for evaluating QoS. The lack of transparent QoS evaluation model makes the service selection challenging. Moreover, most QoS evaluation processes do not consider their historical data which not only helps in getting more accurate QoS but also helps for future prediction, recommendation and knowledge discovery. QoS driven service selection demands a model where QoS can be provided as a service to end users. This paper proposes a layered QaaS (quality as a service) model in the same line as PaaS and software as a service, where users can provide QoS attributes as inputs and the model returns services satisfying the user’s QoS expectation. This paper covers all the key aspects in this context, like selection of data sources, its transformation, evaluation, classification and storage ...

With the emergence of over-the-top (OTT) services, consumers can enjoy broadcasting contents using personal computers, smartphones, and tablets whenever and wherever they want. Not only are traditional broadcasting service providers entering the OTT service market, but Internet service providers are as well, and they are competing with each other to achieve market power. We estimated consumers' preference for OTT service based on conjoint survey data, and conducted a market simulation based on the estimation result in order to analyze the change of market penetration ratio in accordance to the change of market strategy of each broadcasting service provider. As a result, consumers have the highest priority for real-time broadcasting. When the terrestrial television broadcasting service provider does not provide its contents to other service providers, Internet service providers and pay TV service providers can increase their market power by decreasing the price and by increasing the number of VODs respectively.